Feature request: Partial search / Search issues by a partial word

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#1

The suggested feature is to support an asterisk wildcard or a different form of partial search in the issues tab, for example:

is:issue is:open sustain*

which should match sustainable , sustainability  etc.

GitHub provides a fairly elaborate search syntax, as explained here:

https://help.github.com/articles/understanding-the-search-syntax/

https://help.github.com/articles/searching-issues-and-pull-requests/

But it does not support partial searches, as discussed here:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/38532151

Quote from GitHub staff:

Thanks for getting in touch - search doesn’t currently support partial searches, so in your example, you’re correct you would have to search for “feature”. Though not the same, we do however do some stemming for plurals - so searching for “features” would find “feature”.

This is much more problematic in languages with grammatical cases, such as German, Polish, French, Ukrainian, and many more. To give you an example the Polish word for function  is funkcja but depending on the context it can be any of:

funkcja

funkcji

funkcją

funkcję

(and more)

Or plurals:

funkcje

funkcji

funkcjami

funkcje

Without partial searches, you have to go through all of the variations to find the matching issues. This makes the search functionality barely usable in languages other than English.

If we were able to search by funkc , we could find all relevant issues in one go. It is a common functionality in search engines. Optionally this could be done with a wildcard, i.e. funkc*

10 Likes
#2

Hi @bartlomiej-dawidow

Thanks for this feedback! We’re always working to improve GitHub and the GitHub Community Forum, and we consider every suggestion we receive. I’ve logged your feature request in our internal feature request list.

Though I can’t guarantee anything or share a timeline for this, I can tell you that it’s been shared with the appropriate teams for consideration.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Cheers!

#3

Hi, is there anything being done about the search functionality? As the project is growing bigger, searching issues has become near impossible. That is our biggest obstacle to continue using GitHub.

2 Likes
#4

I started to use Google to search issues. That’s sad.

1 Like
#5

Unfortunately that is not possible in private projects!  This is the craziest missing feature I have found in such a long time (have I travelled back in time to 1997?)

#6

Fuzzy searching is an integral feature of most software tooling. It would be immensely useful for Github to support this basic feature.

1 Like
#7

Second this… what needs to be done to make it happen? anyone know?

#8

Hi @andreagriffiths11

could you maybe give us an Update regarding this feature request?

I totaly agree with this.

We have exactly the same Problems with out growing projects. Issues will be generated several times, because the search function did’t show already existing issues.