JQL Searching for issues with comments with particular "icons"

Question

A number of our Jira issues include comments where the commenter used the (x), (!), (?), (i), and (/) icons within the body of the comment.  We would like to be able to build a filter to find only issues with comments that include one of those icons.  I've tried the obvious JQL searches like comment ~ "(/)" or comment ~ "(?)", etc...  with varied results depending on the symbol used.  for example, i don't get an error using x, i, or / but the search doesn't find the right issues.  if I use ? or !, it fails altogether.  Any recommendations?

Devon Campbell_0729h7 · Answer

Thx.  I voted on https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-66244 and left a comment.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-66244?focusedCommentId=1919257&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#comment-1919257

Petter Gonçalves · Answer

Hello Devon,

Thank you very much for your answer.

Analyzing the information you provided and digging a little bit further in our documentation, I was able to find out that indeed this search is not working as documented in this article.

In fact, the search I've sent to you works because x is not a special character, just like you correctly mentioned. When using special characters, it does not work.

A bug was already raised about this behavior:

JQL queries with special characters returns incorrect results

Our developers have decided to change it to a suggestion and open another suggestion to update our documentation since it is working as designed, although it's not working as documented and as the customers expected.

I understand how this decision may be disappointing to you, Devon.

Please, vote and watch the suggestion above in order to change the search way as documented now, using the // to escape special characters. Also, feel free to give your feedback on that.

For more information about why our developers have decided to raise it as a suggestion and not as a bug, check the report below:

- https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-40790

Please, let me know if this information answers your questions.

Devon Campbell_0729h7 · Answer

I should mention, I did try it exactly as you suggested with

comment ~ "$x$"

Which does indeed find a number of issues.  Specifically, the JQL query found 78 of them in the current project:

However... i think that's just because the x isn't a special character.  When I search using only

comment ~ x

I still get the same 78 issues:

But when I replace the x with \! or \?, i get nothing.