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Outline limitations of special character use in search within the Global Search documentation

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Problem to solve

Advanced search does not support a variety of special character usage in search (more details here). This is also not very evident in our documentation, which can lead to frustrating experiences for users.

In addition, this was brought up as an experience recommendation based on a recent UX Scorecard (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-design/-/issues/1679).

Proposal

Update our Global Search documentation to outline some of these limitations, so users can understand why certain searches will not work.

We don't need anything like a full ASCII character map.

The subset of the OWASP® Special character list would cover more than 80% of the real use cases.

" !"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[]^_`{|}~"

An example in documentation as it pertains to Code Search.

https://docs.github.com/en/search-github/searching-on-github/searching-code#considerations-for-code-search

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Next Steps for this issue

Validation track

Build track

  • workflowplanning breakdown - @JohnMcGuire
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Edited by John McGuire