Filtering with JQL ansd special characters

Question

I'm setting up a search regarding the SUMMERY of an issue. And the big thing is that the summary of out issues often contains special character, for Axample the Summary is lime "1045_Alice_User_Access-ADD" and "1046_Alice_User_Access-Delete" ans some more.

every time i'm using "_" or "-" as a part of the search string the search does not give result, i guess its cause "_","-" are special characters in JQL. As far as good, but unfortunately marking this like "Alice\_" or ""Alice_"" does not work.

Hannes Obweger - JXL for Jira · Answer

Hi @hartmut.giehl,

welcome to the community!

I assume that this is related to how Jira does its internal indexing for full text JQL searches; unfortunately, this sometimes leads to unexpected results when searching for terms within longer sequences of characters.

This being said, if you're open to solutions from the Atlassian Marketplace, you'll find several apps that either extend JQL by additional functions, or provide their own, more powerful search mechanisms.

E.g., your use case would be trivial to solve using the app that my team and I are working on: JXL for Jira.

JXL is a full-fledged spreadsheet/table view for your issues that allows viewing, inline-editing, sorting, and filtering by all your issue fields, much like you’d do in e.g. Excel or Google Sheets. One of the filtering options that is available for all fields is text filtering, which performs a partial match by default.

This is how it looks in action:

For more advanced use cases, you can also use logical operators (AND, OR, NOT) as well as regular expressions.

I should also add that JXL can do much more than the above: From support for configurable issue hierarchies, to issue grouping by any issue field(s), sum-ups, or conditional formatting.

Any questions just let me know,

Best,

Hannes

hartmut.giehl · Answer

Thanks for your quick answer,

the exact match works!

But your proposal for wildcard search does not work. this alway returns an empty result quantity.

Kawan Diogo_ykfovu · Answer

Hi @hartmut.giehl Welcome to the community.

To search for summaries with special characters like underscores (_) and hyphens (-), use double quotes to enclose the exact phrase. For example:

Exact Match Search

summary ~ "\"1045_Alice_User_Access-ADD\""

Wildcard Search:

summary ~ "*Alice_User_Access*"

These approaches help handle special characters in JQL.

Please let me know if this helps you.

Best Regards