How can I search by emoticon in Confluence ?

[greg besson]

I'd like to find all occurrences of the question emoticon  in my space. How can I do that ?

Nothing I've tried has been successful 

Thx Greg

[greg besson]

Hello Stephen,

First of all, thank you very much for your solution ! I'll use it for sure  on our own Confluence instance.

But I must admit that I'm deeply astonished by the fact that Atlassian doesn't index this kind of content, which has a semantic meaning by itself (a question mark, even if turned blue, is ... a question mark).

We'll have to find another option if we want to emphasize a question in a document and make it searchable by default (I don't have access as admin on the Confluence instance...)

Thx a lot,

Greg

[Rahav]

+1 for being disappointed that this is not a built in function. We should be able to type the characters of the emoticon in Confluence's search box and have it searched.

It would be really modernize Confluence if in the search bar the characters would turn into the emoticon exactly as it is done on a page.

@greg besson1 Until Confluence engineering releases this in April of 2450 I am adding two or three characters followed by : adjacent to the emoticon, which makes the whole damn thing searchable.

[Stephen Deutsch]

Hi Greg,

The question mark emoticon is saved as the following code:

<ac:emoticon ac:name="question" />

Which is not indexed by the Confluence search engine.  However, there is still a possibility to find it by searching through the text of all pages, but this is not a built-in Confluence function. I wrote a user macro for searching and replacing text in Confluence pages, and if you paste the text above into the search box and select your space, then it should be able to find it.

link to user macro source: https://streamline.atlassian.net/wiki/display/STRMLN/Search+and+Replace+User+Macro

[Stephen Deutsch]

Make sure that you select the option "Display only to Administrators" when putting in the information about the macro, and then also put it in a page which is restricted only to you, since if someone tried to do a search and replace improperly they could mess up a lot of pages