Trouble with escaping characters in advanced search on custom field

Question

I have a custom text field called Revision (single line text).  I can't seem to create a query to capture issues where Revision is (-), the initial rev for an item. All three characters are special characters... but I try Revision ~ $\-$ and the search bar says it can't find that JQL function. Other things I've tried:

$\-$
"$\-$"
'$\-$'
"$\-$"
'$\-$'
'\-'
"\-"
\-
\u0028\u002D\u0029
\u0028

etc.

EDIT:  I found a decent, albeit clumsy, workaround for this. With the SQL+JQL plugin, I can construct a SQL query to embed within JQL that does successfully match all characters, including special characters.

Petter Gonçalves · Answer

Hello Joe,

How are you? I hope you're having a nice Tuesday. :)

Indeed, the JQL parameter contains (~) returns incoherent information when you add special characters to it or return issues that have special characters in the specified field, even when you use the correct scaping characters. There are some reports and a fixed bug that has regressed about this matter:

- JQL queries with special characters returns incorrect results

- Escaping special characters in JQL search doesn't work

Feel free to vote and watch the suggestion to increase its priority and also receive notifications about any updates.

Additionally, thank you very much for sharing that you were able to work around the issue using SQL+JQL plugin. This will absolutely help other community folks facing the same problem.

Let us know if you still have any questions.