PLEASE HELP: CONTAINS and special characters

As a result of a website fulltext search option my application creates a query like

SELECT * FROM myTable WHERE (CONTAINS(text, '%#') > 0);

if a user enters # as query string. Then I get

ORA-29902: error in executing
ODCIIndexStart() routine

ORA-20000: interMedia Text error:
DRG-50937: query too complex
DRG-51030: wildcard query expansion resulted in too many terms.

Obviously, the special character # is the reason for the problem because I don't have any problems with alpha-numeric characters. Other special characters produce this error, too.
I tried to escape by using '%{#}%' and '%\#%' but still got the same error. Do I really have to forbid special characters or is there another solution?

Thank you for your help,

Martin Received on Sat Jan 12 2002 - 12:09:42 CST