I know I am late enough but I am posting here and I hope it'll help others. As we know from the Elasticsearch documentation here ES has some reserved characters.

The reserved characters are: + - = && || > < ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \ /

So, now you've two possible solutions to fix it. These are working perfectly for me when I encountered special character issue

Solution 1: Wrap your special characters with \\

"query": {    "bool": {      "must": [        {          "match": {            "country_code.keyword": "IT"          }        },        {          "query_string": {            "default_field": "display",            "query": "Magomadas \\(OR\\), Italy"          }        }      ]    }  }

Solution 2: Use simple_query_string with no change on your query but it doesn't support default_field, so you can use fields instead.

  "query": {    "bool": {      "must": [        {          "match": {            "country_code.keyword": "IT"          }        },        {          "simple_query_string": {            "fields": ["display"],             "query": "Magomadas (OR), Italy"          }        }      ]    }  }

I was reading the documentation and the query_string is more strict. The following are reserved characters: + - = && || > < ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \ /

So, like jhilden said, I would have to escape them or use simple_query_string instead.

Docs: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/query-dsl-query-string-query.html

As mentioned in prev answers, some characters need to be escaped;

+ - = && || > < ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : \ /

💡 "query": "my:name*&&" should be "query": "my\\:name\\*\\&&"

Regex to the rescue ✨

With the help of a simple regex, we can easily escape these characters

Python

import redef escape_elasticsearch_query(query):    return re.sub('(\+|\-|\=|&&|\|\||\>|\<|\!|\(|\)|\{|\}|\[|\]|\^|"|~|\*|\?|\:|\\|\/)', '\\\\\\1', query)query = 'my:name*&&'escaped_query = escape_elasticsearch_query(query)print(escaped_query)

output:

my\:name\*\&&

Javascript

function escapeElasticsearchQuery(query) {    return query.replace(/(\+|\-|\=|&&|\|\||\>|\<|\!|\(|\)|\{|\}|\[|\]|\^|"|~|\*|\?|\:|\\|\/)/g, '\\$&');}let query = 'my:name*&&';let escapedQuery = escapeElasticsearchQuery(query);console.log(escapedQuery);

output:

my\:name\*\&&