Escaping special characters in Jira JQL Search

[Mathieu Yargeau]

I seem to have the same issue as this person: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/47338 (I'm using the advanced search however, and I'm planning the URL encode the JQL to use the REST API)

I am trying to find specific issues which the summary begins with "[QC TASK]".

I tried the following, which works, but also finds other issues I don't want, like one having the summary "have the QC tasks displayed"

summary~"QC TASK" and status="in progress"

This returns the exact same thing:

summary~"\\[QC TASK\\]" and status="in progress"

And if I don't escape the '[', it results a lot of things that I don't want.

How do I make this work properly? Another solution would be to use an operator "starts with" instead of "contains", does that exist? Or maybe even make the search case sensitive.

[Gregory Schwedock]

It's a bug. Vote and watch it here: JQL queries with special characters [ ] returns incorrect results

Issue has been going on since 2011, this issue is "resolved" but Atlassian has a "\\[funny\\]" definition of resolved: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRASERVER-25092

[Gregory Schwedock]

and it's because JQL implements Apache's Lucene search which strips all non-word characters.

you can use plugins to solve it looks like:

free:

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/proficient.developer.plugins.jira.power-jql/server/overview

or paid: "script runner" plugin.

[Joe Chlimoun]

Power JQL is no longer free, but similar functionality can be achieved with the free SQL+JQL plugin.

[JamieA]

You can't do this in JQL.

ScriptRunner has issueFieldMatch, which you can use like this:

issueFunction in issueFieldMatch("", summary, "\\[QC TASK\\].*")

The first parameter is a JQL function to narrow down the issues where the regex will be run on the summary field.

[Deleted user]

JQL does not have something like that "startsWith". It's documented in their site on what and what you cannot use:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/advanced-searching-179442050.html#id-__JQLTextFields-Summary

There are reserved characters as well

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jira/advanced-searching-functions-338363497.html#AdvancedSearchingFunctions-characters

[Mathieu Yargeau]

Yes, this is the article I read for the reserved characters. I did exactly the same thing as in the example they gave, escaping the '[' and ']', but it still finds the other Jira ticket that doesn't match.

[Deleted user]

I must have been confused by this {quote} And if I don't escape the '[', it results a lot of things that I don't want.{quote}