Wildcard search not working when wildcard is at the beginning

Volker I_

Summary

CQL full-text search does not support leading wildcards, causing incomplete search results for substrings.

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Product & Environment

• Product: Confluence Cloud
• Feature: CQL (Confluence Query Language) – Full-text search
• Version: Cloud (latest)

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Description

I am encountering limitations with CQL full-text search when trying to locate pages containing a specific substring within a larger token.

Currently, leading wildcards are not supported in CQL queries. For example, the following query is not allowed:

text ~ "*write_sol"

Because of this limitation, it is not possible to reliably find all occurrences where a search term appears as a suffix or embedded within a larger string.

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Steps to Reproduce

1. Create or identify pages containing the following strings:
   • write_sol
   • bla_write_sol
   • output.write_sol
   • aaawrite_sol
2. Run the following CQL query: type = page AND text ~ "write_sol"
3. Observe the results.

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Expected Result

All pages containing the substring write_sol should be returned, regardless of:

• prefixes
• separators (_, ., etc.)
• or whether the term is embedded within a longer string

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Actual Result

• Pages where write_sol is separated by delimiters (e.g., _, .) may be found
• Pages containing concatenated strings like aaawrite_sol are not found
• There is no way to perform a true substring search due to missing leading wildcard support

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Impact

• Search results are incomplete and inconsistent
• Users cannot reliably find relevant content
• Behavior depends on internal tokenization, which is not transparent
• No viable workaround exists within CQL

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Suggested Improvement

Please consider one of the following enhancements:

1. Support leading wildcards in CQL full-text search
2. Introduce a substring or “contains” operator independent of tokenization
3. Improve documentation on how tokenization affects search behavior

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Additional Notes

This limitation becomes especially problematic in environments where naming conventions cannot be strictly enforced across all content.

Dan Breyen

Hi @Volker I_ I took a quick look at Atlassian's Jira Site and found these:

CONFCLOUD-78334 CONFCLOUD-80878 CONFCLOUD-76196 

They sound like your issue.  Feel free to vote for and watch them for updates.

If that's not it, you could create another suggestion for this functionality on Atlassian's Jira Site or your Admin could create a work item for Atlassian Support and have them weigh in.

Hope that helps.