Omit characters from search

[rickadesParticipant]

Hi WP-Dreams support,

Is there a way to omit characters in a search?
This should only be applicable for the search within a custom field, _sku to be specific.

Best regards…Rick

[Ernest MarcinkoKeymaster]

Hi Rick,

It depends on what exactly are you looking for. If you want to simply remove certain characters/words from the search phrase, before the search query is executed, then these knowledge base tutorials may help you:
– Replace or remove characters from search phrase
– Replace search keywords (whole words)

There are also two options on the back-end, that allow excluding words (or even single characters), but I don’t recommend those for other than alphanumeric values. In case you need to remove special characters, use the custom code in the examples above.

Best,
Ernest Marcinko
If you like my products, don't forget to rate them on codecanyon :)

[rickadesParticipant]

Hi Ernest,

Probably a mission impossible 😉
The difficult part is the sku’s come from different suppliers. Some use spaces or dashes between characters and others don’t. If a visitor leaves out a space or dash the product can’t be found. Same problem of course if a space or dash is used when there’s none in the sku.

Plus the search is a combined one for posts/pages as well…

Best regards…Rick

[Ernest MarcinkoKeymaster]

Hi Rick,

Actually, I believe there might be a solution to this – using the index table engine.

It may not solve every case, but I designed the indexing process to recognize certain special characters – and words with dashes and dash-like characters are indexed both as a whole, as well as without the dashes, as well as words separated by space where the dashes were.

I highly recommend trying that, it may do the trick to some degree:
– 1. Generating the index table
– 2. Enabling the index table

I hope this helps 🙂

Best,
Ernest Marcinko
If you like my products, don't forget to rate them on codecanyon :)

[rickadesParticipant]

Thanks for your quick reply. Should I generate the index for the sku’s only?

[Ernest MarcinkoKeymaster]

You are welcome.

The index table is a replacement of the regular post type search query, so everything you need to search for should be selected there, not only the SKU-s. If you only searched for SKUs, then of course use the SKUs only.

Best,
Ernest Marcinko
If you like my products, don't forget to rate them on codecanyon :)

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