How can I get Verity to search for strings containing the per cent ("%") symbol?

Question

I have a search application that searches financial documents. The users want to be able to search for percentages - i.e. "100%" or "50%" - but the results don't come back correctly.

For instance, when I search for "1.00%" (which I know exists in some documents), the search results highlight the string "1:00", which is a time, not the literal string I search for.

Is there some way of escaping special symbols like the per cent symbol so that Verity can find them?

@duncan Your solution appears to partially work. Now the problem I'm having is that it's not searching correctly for decimal percentages - i.e. "2.1%" returns results with the string "2 1%" highlighted. I tried switching to type="explicit" with <WORD> before the criteria, but now it brings back nothing. Is there any documentation that gives all characters that Verity views as "special characters". Once I figure that out, I need to find a way to escape all of those characters (I'm thinking a regular expression, but not sure what to do).

Answer 1

Have you tried escaping the % character?

"100\%"

See: http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/web-development/coldfusion/0321223675/verity-search-language/app05lev1sec4