is there a magic function or operator to ignore some tokens?
select to_tsvector('the quick. brown fox') @@ 'brown' -- returns true select to_tsvector('the quick,brown fox') @@ 'brown' -- returns true select to_tsvector('the quick.brown fox') @@ 'brown' -- returns false, should return true select to_tsvector('the quick/brown fox') @@ 'brown' -- returns false, should return true I'm afraid that you are probably stuck. If you run your terms through ts_debug you will see that 'quick.brown' is parsed as a hostname and 'quick/brown' is parsed as filesystem path. The parser really isn't that clever sadly.
My only suggestion is that you preprocess your texts to convert these tokens to spaces. You could easily create a function in plpgsql to do that.
nicg=# select ts_debug('the quick.brown fox'); ts_debug --------------------------------------------------------------------- (asciiword,"Word, all ASCII",the,{english_stem},english_stem,{}) (blank,"Space symbols"," ",{},,) (host,Host,quick.brown,{simple},simple,{quick.brown}) (blank,"Space symbols"," ",{},,) (asciiword,"Word, all ASCII",fox,{english_stem},english_stem,{fox}) (5 rows) As you can see from the above you don't get tokens for quick and brown
