Ampersand (&) in Full-Text Search

[David Stewart]

I've got a query I need to run against a full-text index that involves an ampersand character. The query looks like this:

SELECT event_id FROM search WHERE MATCH (keywords) AGAINST ('a&es' IN BOOLEAN MODE);

It doesn't return any results even though there is an event with 'a&es' as a keyword.

In doing some debugging it appears that only the characters before the ampersand are being used in the query and everything else is being discarded, so:

SELECT event_id FROM search WHERE MATCH (keywords) AGAINST ('arts&entertainment' IN BOOLEAN MODE);

matches any event with 'arts' in the keyword field.

I'm not aware of the ampersand having any special meaning in full-text queries and escaping the ampersand doesn't seem to have any effect.

Is this a bug or a limitation of the full-text index?