searching for "-" give error: Unable to parse the text '-' for field '.

Question

Hey Im trying to search for "-" in a custom text field. But this just resolves in a error: Search: ~ "-" Result: Unable to parse the text '-' for field '. Can anyone help me. Th eproblem is that this is a mandotory field. But sometimes users just put "-". I now want to find these issues.

stephanie.poorman · Answer

Well, I - unfortunately - found the answer:

Special characters

+ - & | ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ ~ * ? \ :

Special characters aren’t stored in the index, which means you can’t search for them. The index only keeps text and numbers, so searching for “$$JIRA Software$$” and “JIRA Software” will have the same effect — escaped special characters ([]) will be ignored in the search.

You can use special characters to combine two separate terms into a phrase. Adding a special character between the terms, like in “JIRA+Software” or “JIRA/Software” will return issues that contain the whole phrase “JIRA Software”.

Nha Huynh · Answer

~ "\-" gives me "No issues were found to match your search"

Dave Hergert · Answer

Per the documentation that was linked to, when doing advanced search you need to use two slashes, i.e. column ~ "\-"