How do you search for an exact phrase in JIRA?

[Greg Froese]

I want to be able to search for something like "first point" where that exact phrase appears in the ticket.  The word "first" followed by "point".

The article here shows how to do that but it doesn't work when I try it.  The results contain word stemming and anything that has both the words in it.

[Mykenna Cepek]

See also these requests/bugs related to exact searches:

• JRACLOUD-69263
• JRACLOUD-21372

Please consider adding your votes to the above; thx.

[Tom Lister]

Hi @Greg Froese

this article is more specific about text searching - Apache Lucene index searches

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jiracoreserver073/search-syntax-for-text-fields-861257223.html

Although it suggests “first point” in double quotes should work. 

You could try a proximity search 

“first point”-1

[Greg Froese]

Thanks for the link, I hadn't considered the proximity search, however, when I tried it, I kept getting results that simply had both words somewhere in the ticket.

In fact, the results contained tickets that had one word in the summary and the other word in the description.  Apparently the proximity was not being respected even across fields.

Further to that, I was seeing results for the singular version of the word I was searching for. 

When searching for "points" I am seeing results with only the word "point"

[Tom Lister]

Hi 

that proximity syntax should have been

"first^0 point"

i.e. 0 words between terms

[Greg Froese]

"first^0 point"

returns the exact same results as:

'"first point"~1'

And they aren't what I expect ;)

[Tom Lister]

:-(

my bad

one last time with feeling as band leaders say

text ~ "\"first point\"~0"

escaping quotes with clause

[Greg Froese]

Still no dice, and I tried with feeling.

The ^ operator is what boosts that terms significance, at least according to the documentation and it isn't getting me the exact string results.

I toyed with the idea of adding an exclusion to my query but that won't work as one of the things I'm searching for is "form" and I'm getting results for "for" which I can't exactly exclude.

Looks like this is something that just cannot be done, which is bizarre as that is a pretty basic request in the searching world

[Tom Lister]

Ok

I did test the text ~ "\"first point\"~0" syntax on my server and it gave the results I expected

although my test was

 text ~ "\"like a\"~0"

matches "I'd like a historical story"

doesn't match "I'd like gap a historical story"

[Greg Froese]

As you can see, I replicated your example, or very close to it.

Just put the word gap between "historical" and "story" as those are more unique words, and the search still returns both tickets.

[Tom Lister]

?? Same test works on my server so they must be different versions/platforms

Mine is 7.12.1 server install. Are you on cloud?

COOL-22 drops out in second search

[Greg Froese]

Yep, on Cloud.

Must be different indexing options which I wouldn't have access to on Cloud.

Thanks for all your help.

[Jack Brickey]

I'm not sure this is possible OOTB. I recall trying this a long time back w/o success and just played with it and could not get it to work. Maybe there is a way but I can't find it. You might check an addon like Scriptrunner. It has and exactmatch function I believe but have not tried it myself.

[Greg Froese]

Needing an addon to perform a basic search seems like overkill.

If this becomes a larger issue with more people unable to find what they are looking for, then I will check into that option a little deeper.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[Tom Lister]

raised as a suggestion with Atlassian

JRASERVER-68490

if you want to follow it

[Greg Froese]

Followed.

Thanks