Escaping special characters in to_tsquery

Question

How do you espace special characters in string passed to to_tsquery? For instance, this kind of query:

select to_tsquery('AT&T');

Produces:

NOTICE:  text-search query contains only stop words or doesn't contain lexemes, ignored

 to_tsquery 
------------

(1 row)

Edit: I also noticed that there is the same issue in to_tsvector.

Answer 1

A simple solution is to create the tsquery as follows:

select $$'AT&T'$$::tsquery;

You can make more complex queries:

select $$'AT&T' & Phone | '|Bang!'$$::tsquery;

See the text search docs for more.

Answer 2

I found this comment very useful that uses the plainto_tsquery('AT&T) function https://stackoverflow.com/a/16020565/350195