How do I escape characters in GitHub code search?

Question

I\'m trying to use GitHub\'s code search to search for some lines of code containing characters like =, +, etc.

I understand from https://help.

Answer 1

You will need to do this locally. Here are some options, from https://stackoverflow.com/a/38288679/362202:

• clone your company's github source website
• do locally a git grep, which supports basic regexp or extended POSIX regexp (git grep -E)
• or a pickaxe search (git log --all -S...
• or git rev-list --all|grep xxx which also allows for regexp

These strategies would not work for github-wide searches, which is a shame.

Answer 2

there is one more (some might say shameful) semi-solution/workaround: Using google...

In the search field enter site:repo-url in addition to your keywords.

I was searching for action$ in the redux-logic repo and was at least able to filter out all the other unwanted action (without the dollar-sign) results which were showing up in the github search. In Google i typed (pay attention to the quotes):

site:https://github.com/jeffbski/redux-logic "action$"

Unfortunately though, google won't list all results. That's why i wrote semi at the beginning. So you can try your luck quickly with google, if you don't find what you were looking for, fallback to checking out the git repo + search with offline-tools like vscode, intellij or cmd-line-tools as suggested by @Ran Ever-Hadani

I hope github will soon come up with a brand-new search feature, which its users can love instead of hate.

Answer 3

I dont think you can escape characters for github

From searching code doc:

You can't use the following wildcard characters as part of your search query: . , : ; / \ ` ' " = * ! ? # $ & + ^ | ~ < > ( ) { } [ ]. The search will simply ignore these symbols.