Can't search for ##1

[kaddkaka]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Issues

Body

When I search for ##1 among issues for example in the verilator project, I get a looot of issues not containing the sequence ##1,

I tried escaping with bakslash and quotes. How can I do it?

This as a search bug — since # is meaningful syntax in several languages (SystemVerilog timing delays, C preprocessor directives, etc.), it'd be great if GitHub's search supported some way to escape it for literal matching.

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[buildwithfiroz]

This is a known limitation of GitHub's search, not something you're doing wrong. The search indexer tokenizes on # (since #123 normally means "reference issue/PR 123"), so it effectively treats # as noise rather than a literal searchable character. That's why quoting ("##1") and backslash-escaping don't work as expected — GitHub's search isn't a literal substring/grep search, so there's currently no supported syntax to force an exact match on symbol sequences like ##1.

A couple of workarounds until/if this gets addressed:

1. Pull issues via the API/CLI and grep locally — this is the most reliable option for exact matching:

​bash gh issue list -R verilator/verilator --search "1" --state all --json number,title,body --limit 1000 | grep '##1' ​

(Search for a broader term like 1 to get a wide net from GitHub's index, then filter for the literal ##1 yourself.)

2. Try an external site-restricted search, e.g. on Google:

​ site:github.com/verilator/verilator/issues "##1" ​

This sometimes preserves substrings that GitHub's own index discards, though it's not fully reliable either since it depends on how the page was crawled/indexed.

3. Vote for/track this as a search bug — since # is meaningful syntax in several languages (SystemVerilog timing delays, C preprocessor directives, etc.), it'd be great if GitHub's search supported some way to escape it for literal matching. Worth flagging clearly as a limitation in your original post so the product team can catalog it as such.

Hope that helps in the meantime!

[kaddkaka]

How to vote for this to be considered a bug?