MySQL MyISAM fulltext search - how to add '#' as a word character for utf8 charset?

Question

I am using MyISAM full text search. The table columns are having charset "utf8" and "utf8_general_ci" as collation.

Now I want to implement #HashTag system, so that if I search for "#HashTag", only rows that contain "#HashTag" show up. Not rows that just contains "HashTag".

According to the comment in this MySQL documentation, its easy to do it for non-multibyte charsets, that is charsets with fixed-width encoding.

But I could not find a good reference for how to do it for utf8 charset. Has anyone done this for utf8 charset columns? If yes, could you list the exact steps?

Also, I want to avoid recompiling MySQL if possible.

Answer 1

Not an answer to your question, but would it not be a good idea to parse out the hash tags during input time using a regular expression, and store them in a separate column? Might be easier (and faster) than bending mySQL into accepting # as a search character.