issue_comments

OK, this is in master now. You can install master using:

pip install https://github.com/simonw/datasette/archive/master.zip

Documentation here: https://datasette.readthedocs.io/en/latest/json_api.html#special-table-arguments

Awesome, thank you so much. I’ll try it out and let you know.

On Sun, Feb 23, 2020 at 1:44 PM Simon Willison notifications@github.com wrote:

You can try this right now like so:

pip install https://github.com/simonw/datasette/archive/search-raw.zip

Then use the following:

?_search=foo*&_searchmode=raw`

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Still needs documentation before I can land it in master.

You can try this right now like so:

pip install https://github.com/simonw/datasette/archive/search-raw.zip

Then use the following:

?_search=foo*&_searchmode=raw`

Nice thing about the "search mode" concept is that I can optionally reflect it in the HTML UI in some way - maybe with a checkbox for "raw" mode that only shows up if the user hits the page with ?_searchmode=raw in the querystring.

It also hints at potentially adding further search modes in the future. Not sure if I'd do that but it's an interesting potential avenue to explore.

?_search_raw= doesn't work because it clashes with an existing feature - you can use ?_search_colname= to search just within a specific column, and there could possibly be a column called raw.

I could go with ?_searchraw= - or maybe have an additional "mode" selection like ?_search=foo*&_searchmode=raw

I'm going to call it ?_search_raw= because it will pass through the value as a raw (unprocessed) argument to SQLite FTS, which means it will expose features other than just wildcards: https://www.sqlite.org/fts5.html#full_text_query_syntax

Thanks Simon, My use case is using Datasette for full text search type ahead. That was working pretty well. The _search_wildcard= option will be awesome. Thanks

I'm afraid this is by design: supporting wildcards in that mode was more-or-less accidental and often resulted in unexpected user-facing syntax errors when users accidentally entered search text that included characters with special meaning to SQLite.

You can still execute wildcard searches but you have to do so using custom SQL statements.

I'm open to suggestions for more friendly ways to support this functionality. Would an alternative _search_wildcard= URL parameter be worth supporting I wonder? What's your specific use-case for wildcards?