add wildcard search over repositories

[aahmadai]

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Hello,

Is there any way to include wildcard searches over repositories.

for example
*{some string match} e.g want to see all repos that contain the string 'works'.
?{some character}

and, option for proximity searching...
e.g what other repos on github outside of the organization are about solving the same problem or have similar project basis....maybe include three degrees of separation...morelikethis repo...

[look]

Is there any way to include wildcard searches over repositories.

for example *{some string match} e.g want to see all repos that contain the string 'works'. ?{some character}

We plan to implement this, but haven't gotten to it yet. For now, you can search a list of repositories by joining them with OR. If you use the same list a lot, you can save them as a saved search and use it for future searches.

and, option for proximity searching...
e.g what other repos on github outside of the organization are about solving the same problem or have similar project basis....maybe include three degrees of separation...morelikethis repo...

Interesting idea! Can you write more about how you would expect this to work?

[MNLierman]

I can tell you how I expect it to work. I'm searching a repo right now with millions of lines of code, and I'm looking for two phrases that should be on the same line together and this is what I expected to be able to do "phrase1(asterisk)phrase2(asterisk)" because phrase1 is a get_variable type of function, for checking if a variable exists in the nvram and gets the value if it does, and the code functionality changes depending on if variables are defined in the settings json residing in memory. I need to know what certain variables are named and I know part of the name I'm searching for, but not the other part. There are thousands possible variables that are only saved in a json if they are defined, and there is no defined list of possible variables. Many of the debug variables are not used at all unless you know them or can spend the time searching for them in the code. Hence why I thought I could use a wildcard to easily find the variables I need. I guess I can't do this, sad day.

[dimpase]

impossibility to use wildcards in searches is really debilitating - at least to people comfortable with grep. E.g.

$ gh search prs lazypowerseries --repo=sagemath/sage

returns 3 PRs, OK.
But none of

$ gh search prs lazypower --repo=sagemath/sage
$ gh search prs lazypower* --repo=sagemath/sage

return anything. Do you really want us to resort to using web search engines?

[svanimisetti]

@look - any update on this? For enterprise org owners, the inability to use wildcards in repo/team search boxes is quite debilitating. I have resort to API and that is slow and cumbersome at most. If this feature is in development, is there a timeline for production roll out?

[trojblue]

bump

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[MNLierman]

You actually can use wildcards on the web UI, through regex, and it's super easy to accomplish. I just tested these again in a new window, even tho I use them from time to time.

Using wildcards on GitHub:
/*term you are wanting to find*/

However, I found that this often is like searching for a needle in a haystack. I found, if I know any terms or code that I expect to be on the same line as the term im hoping to find, this helps narrow that down significantly.

Narrowing it down:
/term1.*term2*/

For example, I used the above when searching through router and modem code looking for nvram debug settings. This is what that search looked like, and again this is on the GitHub.com.

/nvram get.*debug*/

cc @svanimisetti - Was trying to quote you directly and it wanted to create a nested thread.

[svanimisetti]

@MNLierman - I still get an invalid name response. However, I see that GitHub search tries to interpret it as a regular expression without forward slashes.

For example, if I query org:MyOrg repo:TOOL_.* -- I get a response Invalid repository name: (^|/)TOOL_\.[^/]*$. So it seems GitHub is trying to do its own substitutions for regex. Is there any other way to force GitHub to use regex inside qualifiers? The forward slashes you mentioned do not seem to work with repository qualifier.