Enable and disable exact match on frontend?

[expromo]

Hello,

I would like to know if it is possible to give frontend users the choice whether they prefer to search with full word exact match or without it (substring search). It would be a really important for my users to have this ability.

Best regards
Patryk

[Ernest Marcinko]

Hi Patryk,

On the Frontend Search Settings -> General panel you can enable the “Show exact matches only” option: http://i.imgur.com/6zMBR46.png
Exact matching is still a substring matching, however the string must match as it is, including the ordering.

Exact matching with word boundaries is not possible without using regular expressions (using the RLIKE operator) in mySQL, which is extremely inefficient and resource heavy, it’s not implemented for safety reasons.

[expromo]

Thanks for this response, but we did not mean the exact vs. fuzzy matching, but full word vs. partial word match: the choice corresponding to your Behaviour setting AND versus AND WITH EXACT WORD MATCH.

[Ernest Marcinko]

That is unfortunately not possible yet, planned feature for the upcoming release.

However you could try the following custom code to re-purpose the exact matches option:

This will basically detect if the “Show exact matches” option in selected, and if yes then changes the keyword logic to “and with exact keyword matches” instead of the default behavior.

[expromo]

Nice.
This code changes the search behaviour just as I wanted.

Thank you 🙂

[Ernest Marcinko]

You are very welcome!

If you don’t mind, I will close this topic and mark it as resolved for now, feel free to open another one if you have other questions/issues.

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