Support for literal (quoted) search queries

[iRon7]

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(Not sure whether this request belong here, but already started here. Please refer me to the correct repository if that is incorrect)

Several programing and scripting languages use dashes (-) and/or dots (.) in their naming conventions for items as variables and functions. In my specific case I am mainly concerned in PowerShell. PowerShell has a well defined naming convention for functions (also called cmdlets) which is basically: Verb-Noun. Therefore it is often imperative to be able to search for the complete cmdlet (Verb-Noun) name as e.g. Write-Output which currently results in all issues that contain both words (Write and Output). Because these are quiet common words especially in programming issues, a concerned search query results almost in every existing issue rather than just a subset that just contains the literal word/phrase Write-Output.
This also appears a requirement for several other languages:

• Searching difficulties with hyphens (-) and periods (.) in assets
• Queries with hyphens search just for the part before the hyphen

See also:

• How do I escape characters in GitHub code search? [duplicate]
• How to search on GitHub to get exact string matches, including special characters

Proposed solution

Support literal searches by e.g. using double quotes, as e.g.: "Write-Output" in:title

Even the fact that all search keywords that get inserted into the searchindex table in the database go through a normalization process, which includes things like removing punctuation from a given string because those are typically considered noise in a search, it should to my opinion be possible to further narrow down the current listed results with the literal phrases in the actual query.

Guidelines

• I have read the above statement and can confirm my post is relevant to the GitHub feature areas Issues and/or Projects.

[martinwoodward]

I think the new search we rolled at out the start of May supports quoted searches for common coding character sets.

For example does this not return the results you would expect? https://github.com/search?q=repo%3APowerShell%2FPowerShell+%22get-command%22&type=issues

[kilasuit]

Looking at my tests especially across an org and not a repo I am seeing some additional results added that are similar but not an exact match to the quoted string - for example with these searches
Some results in the below queries on the first few pages aren't exact matching the query string we provide & only in the in the title, but it seems to be pattern matching on the first part of it before the hyphen (whilst seemingly including it) but is correctly just searching in the title

Query org:powershell "write-output" in:title
https://github.com/search?q=org%3Apowershell+%22write-output%22+in%3Atitle&type=issues&ref=advsearch
The other results from this query include write- in the title for just a few that I could see were Write-host, Write-Error, Write-Verbose, Write-Progress and likely more if you dug deeper in the results, though from what I could see they all also had output in the title too

Query org:powershell "get-command" in:title
https://github.com/search?q=org%3Apowershell+%22get-command%22+in%3Atitle&type=issues&ref=advsearch
The other results from this query include get- in the title for just a few that I could see were Get-Help, Get-WMIObject, Get-ComputerInfo, Get-LoremIpsum, Get-WinEvent and likely more if you dug deeper in the results, though from what I could see they all also had command in the title too

so it seems that it's pattern matching to the first half with hyphen and also second half after the hyphen. Not sure if you had a query that needed something like get-this-awesome-command or something like that.

Does that help @martinwoodward?

An additional exactquerymatch parameter or an nearexactquerymatch parameter or along those lines would be an awesome addition here, as I can see these additional returned results being of use even if not what the searcher was initially looking for.

[tamird]

A similar thing happens when you search for "as _" - the space is ignored and you get results for "as", "as_", "_", and possibly other combinations that don't match the intent.

[dloez]

This would be also useful for non code search, like for example searching for 'is:pr is:closed "to exceed"' also returns PRs that include "to do not exceed" in the PR title.

[dictoon]

This is also an issue when looking for references to specific Jira tickets, e.g. PROJECT-123: GitHub's search will look for PROJECT and 123 independently...

[samus-aran]

We feel this feature request is better aligned in the Code Search & Navigation category. I've gone ahead and moved it for you. Thank you for sharing your request!

[effleurager]

Does is:issue fall under Code Search & Navigation? This is an issue across all searching on GitHub

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