Character replacement during indexing

Character replacement during indexing can be used, for example, to convert all text to lowercase characters or to remove diacritics from text. Such replacements can reduce the size of an index on disk if the case of characters or diacritics are not significant. Character replacements are performed during indexing only if the UseCharacterReplacements property of the index settings is true; the default value is false. See also Character replacements page in the Managing dictionaries section.

Since version 26.10, the character replacement dictionary and the UseCharacterReplacements setting can be changed only while the index contains no documents and is not performing an operation; otherwise, InvalidOperationException is thrown. Therefore, configure them after creating a new index and before adding the first document, as the example below does. To use other character replacements with documents that are already indexed, create a new index and index the documents again. See the Index format and compatibility page for details.

The example below demonstrates how to configure and use character replacements during indexing.

C#

string indexFolder = @"c:\MyIndex\";
string documentFolder = @"c:\MyDocuments\";
 
// Enabling character replacements in the index settings
IndexSettings settings = new IndexSettings();
settings.UseCharacterReplacements = true;
 
// Creating a new index in the specified folder
// The character replacements can be changed only while the index contains no documents
Index index = new Index(indexFolder, settings, true);
 
// Configuring character replacements
// Deleting all existing character replacements from the dictionary
index.Dictionaries.CharacterReplacements.Clear();
// Creating new character replacements
CharacterReplacementPair[] characterReplacements = new CharacterReplacementPair[Char.MaxValue + 1];
for (int i = 0; i < characterReplacements.Length; i++)
{
    char character = (char)i;
    char replacement = Char.ToLower(character);
    characterReplacements[i] = new CharacterReplacementPair(character, replacement);
}
// Adding character replacements to the dictionary
index.Dictionaries.CharacterReplacements.AddRange(characterReplacements);
 
// Indexing documents from the specified folder
index.Add(documentFolder);
 
// Searching in the index
// Case-sensitive search is no longer possible for this index, since all characters are lowercase
// By default, case-insensitive search is performed
SearchResult result = index.Search("Einstein");

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