Allow exact string search queries (for things like taxa and projects)

[kaldari]

If I want to retrieve all the genera on iNaturalist called 'Hydria', I would use a query like:
https://api.inaturalist.org/v1/taxa?q=Hydria&is_active=true&rank=genus&all_names=false
Unfortunately, this also retrieves the genus Hydriastele since it starts with the string 'Hydria'. I know I can filter this out in post-processing, but it seems like there should be a way to query for 'Hydria' exactly rather than always doing a prefix search. Maybe a new boolean query parameter could be added called 'prefixsearch' (defaults to true) or 'exactstring' (defaults to false) or something like that.

[kaldari]

It looks like the EOL API uses the query param 'exact' for this purpose.

[kueda]

IMO exact=true sounds useful.

[kaldari]

@pleary @caseyhofford - Since it looks like there's a lot of API work going on lately, I wanted to put in a plug for this small feature request. It would really help for apps that interact with iNaturalist taxonomy and projects. Not being able to do exact string searches is a frustrating limitation that everyone has to work around currently.

[vizagite]

this is a relevant pull request and probaby better fixed in adjusting ranking system directly #565

[zygoballus]

@vizagite - There are many use cases, especially for taxon search, where you only want to get a single result, not a list of results (or zero results if there are no exact matches). So I still think an exact=true option would be useful.