allow whitespace after colon in pairs

[deepak]

can we parse something like. eg.

user_name: deepak user_kind: offline

it has a space after the :

we can parse without space as of now. eg.

user_name:deepak user_kind:offline

modified the ragel file to something like

key_terminator = ':' | ': ' ;
pair = bareword % key key_terminator value ;

before looking at the forks
and found @makeitnew fork
makeitnew@c71705f#diff-ad07a259cc78956e22ff8e72d62d3925R60

it has

pair = bareword % key ':' ' '* value ;

[deepak]

github's search handles terms without spaces. eg. is:closed is:pr at https://github.com/bruce/keyword_search/pulls?q=is%3Aclosed+is%3Apr+

but fails if it has spaces eg. is: closed is:pr https://github.com/bruce/keyword_search/pulls?q=is%3A+closed+is%3Apr+

[eric]

I'm definitely not in favor of allowing a space after the colon. I haven't seen any similar query language that allows for that, and it just adds a lot of possible ambiguity and confusion.

[bruce]

@deepak, thanks for your input on the project.

In this case I tend to agree with @eric. I'd feel differently if I've seen it in the wild -- and a cursory look at GMail's interface (notable because keyword_search was originally modeled after it) shows it has the same restriction (eg, has:attachment and has: attachment have different behaviors).

If I wanted to support this format in my own applications, I'd probably attempt to normalize user input before parsing with keyword_search; otherwise I'd try to make the expected format clear to my users as GMail does here: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en

[deepak]

thanks @bruce and @eric
in that case, I will close this issue

I had another search query, like user_name: user_phone: user_kind:offline
here wrote a regex to clean the query
and get user_name:<none> user_phone:<none> user_kind:offline

will try something similar for this issue