: I think the answer to my question is contained in the wiki when discussing : the SynonymFilter, "The Lucene QueryParser tokenizes on white space before : giving any text to the Analyzer". This would indeed explain what I am : getting. Next question - can I avoid that behavior?
it's the nature of the lucene query parser -- whitespace is a "meta character" that provides instructions to the parse, just like '+', '\', '"', etc... you could always use a quoted string (so the parser treats all of your input as one phrase) or try the "field" QParser (which is essentailly the same thing as using a quoted phrase but doesn't require the quotes, or respect any of the other escape characters) -Hoss
