MySQL MyISAM fulltext search - how to add ‘#’ as a word character for utf8 charset

[Sabyasachi Ruj]

I am using MyISAM full text search. The table columns are having charset "utf8" and "utf8_general_ci" as collation.

Now I want to implement #HashTag system, so that if I search for "#HashTag", only rows that contain "#HashTag" show up. Not rows that just contains "HashTag".

According to the MySQL documentation and in its comment (http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-fine-tuning.html), its easy to do it for fixed-width charset encoding.

But I could not find a good reference for how to do it for utf8 charset. Has anyone done this for utf8 charset columns? If yes, could you list the exact steps?

Also, I want to avoid recompiling MySQL if possible.