What are safe characters to use in SQL Server Full Text Search? I've been playing with full text search on SQL Server 2012. I must say my attempts to target special characters in search queries were futile - SS does not understand them. What's more, sometimes the presence of special characters breaks the query entirely and SS reports an error. I haven't been able to understand when and how and what characters are okay and when they break things. I haven't found any way to target special characters in search short of escaping/replacing them with some other characters. I've also stumbled onto this article http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/tip/Using-full-text-search-for-symbols-in-SQL-Server which implies some special characters work like they do in regular expressions. I haven't been able to confirm this hypothesis in practice - escaping as suggested in the article does not work and those characters do not function as regex commands either.

Can anybody point me to a concise [working] explanation of how to deal with FTS and special characters? I haven't found anything useful on the web. I also have read through questions on SO, they were equally unhelpful.
It is difficult to answer the question specifically without a good description of what you are trying to achieve and why, but it appears that Full-Text Search may not be a good fit for you based on your need to search for characters that are either reserved for a special purpose within the full-text engine, treated as delimiters by word-breakers, or present as a stopword in the default system stoplist.

The Full-Text Search feature is primarily aimed at performing linguistic searches on words and phrases using the rules of a particular language like English, German, or French, for example. Searching for programming keywords like $partition in T-SQL will probably not work as you would hope because $partition is not a word or phrase in any of the available 50 (spoken) languages. If there were a T-SQL language option, things would be different.

It might be possible use a custom dictionary of 'new words' to meet your requirements, but this is not something I have directly experimented with myself. I think that's about as helpful an answer as I can offer without knowing more about your needs.