Hi Tom,

Thank you for looking at this.  You are right I couldn't find anything in the 
docs that would explain this.

I can't think of any rationale for producing a query like this so it does look 
like a bug.

Best regards,

Alastair




________________________________
From: Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Sent: 10 October 2019 14:35
To: Alastair McKinley <a.mckin...@analyticsengines.com>
Cc: pgsql-general@lists.postgresql.org <pgsql-general@lists.postgresql.org>; 
teo...@sigaev.ru <teo...@sigaev.ru>
Subject: Re: websearch_to_tsquery() and apostrophe inside double quotes

Alastair McKinley <a.mckin...@analyticsengines.com> writes:
> I am a little confused about what us being generated by 
> websearch_to_tsquery() in the case of an apostrophe inside double quotes.
> ...

> select websearch_to_tsquery('"peter o''toole"');
>      websearch_to_tsquery
> ------------------------------
>  'peter' <-> ( 'o' & 'tool' )
> (1 row)

> I am not quite sure what text this will actually match?

I believe it's impossible for that to match anything :-(.
It would require 'o' and 'tool' to match the same lexeme
(one immediately after a 'peter') which of course is impossible.

The underlying tsvector type seems to treat the apostrophe the
same as whitespace; it separates 'o' and 'toole' into
distinct words:

# select to_tsvector('peter o''toole');
       to_tsvector
--------------------------
 'o':2 'peter':1 'tool':3
(1 row)

So it seems to me that this is a bug: websearch_to_tsquery
should also treat "'" like whitespace.  There's certainly
not anything in its documentation that suggests it should
treat "'" specially.  If it didn't, you'd get

# select websearch_to_tsquery('"peter o toole"');
    websearch_to_tsquery
----------------------------
 'peter' <-> 'o' <-> 'tool'
(1 row)

which would match this tsvector.

                        regards, tom lane

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