Worldwide Sarch -- Server Error 500

[+Lissi&Gusti]

Entering a "&" (ampersand) into the new global search causes a server error 500.

 

Entering a "+" (plus) returns 21 caches, none of which appear to contain a "+" in their name.

 

Why would I want to search for such caches? There is a challenge cache which calls for one to spell one's caching nick with the initial letters of found cache names. Our nick contains an &, another team we cache with has a + in their nick... (xkcd 327, btw.)

 

Lissi&Gusti

[+HHL]

You must not jot down the ampersand into the location field. (That field is for city, state, coordinates and GCCode only. Afaik, none of them contains an ampersand) Hit the Add Filter button and jot it down into the keyword field.

 

 

Hans

[+Lissi&Gusti]

That makes sense. It still doesn't work, at least not now.

 

Both + and & in the "Geocache Name Contains ..." filter field lead to: "Oh no, a DNF! We couldn't find any geocaches that matched your search."

 

Since it very clearly worked for you, I'm guessing there's some behind-the-scenes code tuning going on.

[+The A-Team]

Since it very clearly worked for you, I'm guessing there's some behind-the-scenes code tuning going on.

It looks like if the "&" is in between other characters, the search works as expected (e.g. "hide & seek"). However, if you search for only that character, the search fails. If the character is at the start or end of the keyword (e.g. "&seek" or "hide&"), the character is ignored and the rest of the keyword is searched for.

 

Strangely, if you search for "hide+seek", you only get results with "hide & seek" in their names. Otherwise, the same behaviour as the "&" above applies.

 

It's understandable that the search has issues with these characters, because they're used as operators in URLs, HTML, and likely whatever other code is running in the background on the servers (e.g. scripting languages, database access, etc.). The developers could probably get them to work, but it may take quite a bit of effort to deal with these special cases.

[+Lissi&Gusti]

I have looked at my GSAK database for some caches that have names I'd class as "possibly difficult", and searched for them using "Search with filter", "Geocache Name Contains ..." and "Searching without a location".

 

These work, and are found in the search:

 

GC6B8W0 قهوة

GC4M52B συναισϑάνομαι

GC531VV Ночной Дозор

 

These don't:

 

GC6DTXQ ²

GC4XY7M .

GCMM7M ?

GC3HC6G ......

GC355Z2 .--. ..- --.. --.. .-.. . -.-. .- -.-. .... .