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search exact word

Ewa Śliwińska

I would like to search simply for word "logs". Unfortunately, that gives me a hundred of results, from which most are "logging", "logged", "log", which are very similar, but it's hard to shell from them.

I tried with single/double quotes and without them.

I seem like a duplicate of this topic, but answers from there haven't helped me. I'm using Confluence 6.4.1.

This and this topic also haven't helped me - I'm not using any special chars/regular expressions.
Besides, they are quite old.
I also checked an error which is connected with search, but it is resolved.

I feel like I'm missing something because it seems that I can't use a very basic functionality (and quite important ).

Thanks in advance.

Accepted answers

Davin Studer

Try this in your search. A little know feature is that Confluence can also do regular expression searches. Put it in the search box exactly as is below.

/.*logs.*/

All comments

Shannon S

Ewa,

This is something we're indeed working on and you can track below:

CONFSERVER-14910

It will help us if you can provide your feedback on the following survey:

Confluence server - search

In the meantime, I would recommend using a more specific search term to get exactly the result you need.

Thank you for your understanding.

Regards,

Shannon

Ewa Śliwińska

Thank you. Can't use more specific search term because then I find nothing This was my last resort. But it's good to know that you are working on it, good luck and have a good day

Davin Studer

Try this in your search. A little know feature is that Confluence can also do regular expression searches. Put it in the search box exactly as is below.

/.*logs.*/

Ewa Śliwińska

Great, this works like a charm. Thanks a lot!
You're right, I didn't know that, even during searching (in this topic) I found excactly opposite information (I know that this is all topic)
It's a shame that Attlasian team wasn't the one who respond with this solution.

Shannon S

Hi Ewa,

This expression that Davin has sent you is a wildcard search, as documented here:

Confluence Search Syntax

Leading wildcards

Lucene doesn't allow wildcards at the beginning of your search, but you can format your search as a regular expression as a workaround. For example, you can't search for *hum* or ?hum*, as they begin with a wildcard, but you can search for /.*hum.*/ and find things like hum, human, and inhumane.

Please be aware that it will return all results that include "logs" and not restrict to only "logs". Therefore it could potentially find things like analogs, epilogs, etc. and return more search results than intended.

If you do not like this behavior, then you can still vote on the feature request I sent you for exact text search.

I hope that clarifies things!

Regards,
Shannon

Ewa Śliwińska

Dear Shannon,

thank you for this note.
However, this is you who could tell me what Davin told - cause in my case this is much better than just waiting for exact search to be exact search.
This is another thing - I already voted on this bug and filled the survey. That doesn't change the fact that this workaround is this particular case works like a charm for me. Actually, I didn't even notice any wider results.
So in both cases we have more results than we expect, we just need to pick which evil is less
Probably there is a way to write regular expression to exact word, I don't know that, but I also don't need it at the moment.