Santizing search value with selectorValue

[alexcapes]

Hi, 

I have a site search working correctly on a project, however I seem to be having issue when the search term contains characters such as question marks or brackets.

I'm doing the following... 

$q = $input->get->text('q');

if($q) {
  $input->whitelist('q', $q);
  $q = $input->get->selectorValue('q');
}

$matches = "search_cache~={$q}, sort=-publish_date";

This works correctly for everything except searches that include characters such as ? or ( )

So for example a searches for the following (where the page title is "example title?")

1. example title
2. example title?

The first one works as expected and the second returns 0 results.

As the titles are very specific for a user to search, I need to make sure the search works with these kind of characters.

How can I make sure search works with these kind of characters?

 

 

 

 

[alexcapes]

I've updated my code to remove ? ( ) from the selectorValue

  $q = preg_replace('/[?()]/', '', $q);

However I wonder how many other characters may possibly break the search and whether there's a better way to sanitize?

[BitPoet]

If you search using ~=, you're performing a fulltext search (aka natural language search) that only looks for words. If you need to be able to search for non-word characters too, you'll have to use %= (LIKE).

For fulltext, you'll likely need to clear out any non-word, non-digit, non-whitespace and non-connecting characters, e.g. with '/[^\p{N}\p{L}\p{Pc}\p{Zs}]/u'.