How to properly escape OR and AND in lucene query?

Question

When I passed in a query "state:OR" lucene gave an error because it considers "OR" as a keyword for boolean clause, but here I actually man the abbreviation of Oregon, the state.

I have seen that quoting OR so the query becomes 'state:"OR"' makes it work.

but this doesn't sound like a very good approach, since I'll have to do a string substitution for EACH of the keywords that lucene uses: AND OR NOT and others?? I don't how many

I tried directly constructing the query instead of doing queryParser.parse(), but it seems that this does not go through the analyzers, which is a big problem.

Answer 1

There are a number of ways to escape this, the cleaner is to escape AND, OR, & NOT with leading backslashes eg:

\\AND \\OR \\NOT

alternately, the code parser will not parse their lowercase equivalents as operators

Answer 2

There are only 3 standalone keywords in the Lucene query syntax -- AND, OR, and NOT. ("TO" is also used, but is only recognized inside of a range query.)

It may help that your quoting code only needs to recognize the Lucene keywords actually used as terms in your application (like the "OR" above in your example).