escaping forward slashes in elasticsearch - elasticsearch

Question

I am doing a general search against elasticsearch (1.7) and all is well except my account numbers have forward slashes in them. The account number field is not the id field and is "not_analyzed".
If I do a search on an account number e.g. AC/1234/A01 then I get thousands of results, presumably because it is doing a regex search (?).
{
"query" : { "query_string" : {"query" : "AC/1234/A01"} }
}
I can get the result I want by doing an exact match search
{
"query" : { "query_string" : {"query" : "\"AC/1234/A01\""} }
}
This actually gives me the result I want and probably will fit the bill as a backup option (surrounding all 'single word' searches with quotes). However I'm thinking if they do a multiple word search including the account number I will be back to thousands of results and although I can't see the value of that search I would like to avoid it happening.
Essentially I have a java app querying elastic search and I would like to escape all forward slashes entered in the GUI.
My Googling has told me that
{
"query" : { "query_string" : {"query" : "AC\\/1234\\/A01"} }
}
ought to do this but it makes no difference, the query works but I still get thousands of results.
Could anyone point me in the right direction ?

Answer 1

You should get what you want without escaping anything simply by specifying a keyword analyzer for the query string, like this:
{
"query" : {
"query_string" : {
"query" : "AC\\/1234\\/A01",
"analyzer": "keyword" <---- add this line
}
}
}
If you don't do this, the standard analyzer is used (and will tokenize your query string) whatever the type of your field is or whether it is not_analyzed or not.

Answer 2

Use this query as example:
{
"query": {
"query_string": {
"fields": [
"account_number.keyword"
],
"query": "AC\\/1234\\/A01",
"analyzer": "keyword"
}
}
}

Answer 3

I use query_string because I want to give my users the possibility to do complex queries with OR and AND. Having the search break when a slash is used (e.g. when searching for an URL) is not helpful.
I worked around that issue by adding quotes when a slash is in the search string but no quotes:
if (strpos($query, '/') !== false && strpos($query, '"') === false) {
$query = '"' . $query . '"';
}