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.