Can “Java-only” analyzer be used under Lucene.Net?

Question

I thought the answer is "No". But I saw some interesting words of Microsoft MVP Simone Chiaretta:

Directoy

The index structure is compatible with all ports of Lucene, so you could also have the indexing done with .NET and searched with Java, or the other way around .....

Analyzer

In a few words the analyzer contains the policy for extracting index terms from the text. ..... And the java version has even more analyzers that have not been ported to .net yet.

From this it follows that I can create an index using non-.NET features (e.g. using Snowball analyzer), and use it in a Lucene.Net-driven application. Is it true or not?

Answer 1

An important factor to remember is which analyzer will be used at search time. If the analyzer used to parse and analyze the search text will not reduce to what the indexing analyzer output, then there will be false negatives. So while your index will be read fine from Lucene.Net, you may be missing results.