Issues with Search REST API: Special Characters Handling

[Le-Caignec]

What happened?

Hello,

I am currently using the Octokit library to interact with the GitHub Search REST API, and I am facing to an issue that is impacting my ability to use it effectively:

.Handling of Special Characters: Queries that include certain special characters do not execute as expected. For example, the query containing return ( fails, whereas return( (without a space before the parenthesis) succeeds. I attempted to resolve this issue using encodeURI, as recommended in some discussions on GitHub, but it seems this workaround does not apply effectively when using Octokit to interact with the search API.

Here is an example of a failing query:

const query = 'return (';
const results = await octokit.rest.search.code({
  q: query
});

And a succeeding one:

const query = 'return( ';
const results = await octokit.rest.search.code({
  q: query
});

Could you please provide guidance on how to handle these issues? Are there any recommended practices for managing long queries and special characters specifically through Octokit? Any help would be greatly appreciated as these limitations are hindering my usage of the API for larger, more complex code searches.

Thank you for your assistance.

Versions

Node: v20
Octokit: 3.1.2

Relevant log output

No response

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

[github-actions]

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[joebochill]

I'm having a similar issue when trying to search for a string that includes double quotes.

E.g.,
if I search for "react", the quotes are ignored and I get results that don't have the quotes
if I search for \"react\" I get the same as above

Edit: never mind, it looks like the legacy GitHub search api doesn't support these special characters, so I'll have to find my own workaround. https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/searching-on-github/searching-code

[xiaohuohumax]

I also encountered a similar issue.

const language = "C++"
const { data: { items }, url } = await this.octokit.rest.search.repos({
      q: `language:${language}`,
      sort: 'stars',
      order: 'desc',
      per_page: 10,
})
console.log(url);
// https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=language%3AC++&sort=stars&order=desc&per_page=10

The search language is c++, but the search results are related to c.
Because '+' is treated as a space in 'c++'.

Expected result.

https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=language%3AC%2B%2B&sort=stars&order=desc&per_page=10