JQL Exclude Text Search

[Stephen Gurnick]

I am attempting to perform the following JQL search in JIRA:

project = PROJECTNAME AND status = Open AND assignee in (username) AND comment !~ "generic"

My understanding of what this should return is: All open issues in project PROJECTNAME that are assigned to username that do NOT contain "generic" in the comments.

What I end up getting in the results are issues that both do and do not contain the text "generic". The results do correctly match the other criteria in the JQL statement.

I found another Answers post regarding similar behavior. However the result there was to save two separate filters and then join them together in third filter. While this is indeed a workaround, is this the expected functionality?

Based on the JQL documentation, my understanding of the !~ operator in text searches is it performs a DOES NOT CONTAIN fuzzy search.

Is my logic incorrect here? I am missing something else?

Appreciate any help you can provide.

[Chris Purser]

Yeah I'm having the same issues - not a single effort to reveal a result excluding a word has worked for me.

Examples that all fail:

project = HLP AND text ~ "create" -build

project = HLP AND text ~ -build

project = HLP AND text ~ "create" NOT "build"

project = HLP AND NOT text ~ "build"

and several others that should seem to work but don't according to the instructions here

https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/search-syntax-for-text-fields-764478343.html

[Aditya Khandelwal]

Instead of 'text', I could split it into 'summary', 'description', etc and then I was able to use it like:

summary~"blah" AND summary !~"blah1"

or description !~"blah2"

[Amir Katz (Outseer)]

See the answer by Ignacio Pulgar (May 9, 2018) in this thread:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-Core-questions/Search-for-issues-that-do-not-contain-text/qaq-p/455633

[Maximus Tremor]

Actually that should work:

project = PROJECTNAME AND status = Open AND assignee in (username) AND comment ~-"generic" (please pay attention to 'minus' sign befor 'generic' copy).

For details please check out https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftwarecloud/search-syntax-for-text-fields-764478343.html ("Excluded term: -" section).

[Peter Flynn]

For me that gives an error "Expecting either 'OR' or 'AND' but got 'generic'" (in JIRA 7.2)

[Daniel Johnson]

I tried it with the - inside the quotation and it displays results, but it's no different than if I were filtering for that specific text, so it didn't work for me.

[Kirk Nedreberg]

I got an example to work for me with the - and NO quotation marks.

[Correction] It filtered out most of the results, but still had some with the text I wanted excluded.

[Philipp Sendek]

Hey Stephen, 

I tend to use NOT instead of the symbolic operator for negation, however I don't know if that would work in your case. 

Maybe you could try AND NOT comment ~ "generic". 

I hope it helps. 

Regards, 

Philipp

[Stephen Gurnick]

Hi Philipp, I did try this method as well, but unfortunately got the same results as using the !~​ operator. Thank you for the suggestion though. -- Stephen

[Peter Flynn]

If I do AND NOT text ~ "anything" then the search always returns zero results. Boggles the mind how such basic things never seem to work as expected in JIRA.