sanitiser selectorValue and advanced text search #=

[AAD Web Team]

I was trying to use the advanced text search (#=) operator in a selector, and I couldn’t work out why my search for the text:

+cat dog

wasn’t working properly (the plus sign was being ignored), while a search for:

dog +cat

works fine. Also, prefixing words with minus always worked fine. Phrase searching with double-quotes wasn’t working, but it was fine with parenthesis.

After a while I realised this was due to the $sanitizer->selectorValue() function I was using on the query string before using it in the selector. The following things are true:

$sanitizer->selectorValue('+cat dog') === 'cat dog'; // Discards the leading plus sign, search doesn't work as expected.
$sanitizer->selectorValue('dog +cat') === '"dog +cat"'; // Keeps the plus sign and puts double-quotes around the string.

$sanitizer->selectorValue('-cat dog') === '"-cat dog"'; // Keeps the minus sign and puts double-quotes around the string.
$sanitizer->selectorValue('dog -cat') === 'dog -cat'; // Keeps the minus sign, no double-quotes.

$sanitizer->selectorValue('"jet black cat"') === '"jet black cat"'; // Keeps double-quotes; phrase searching doesn't work.
$sanitizer->selectorValue('jet "black cat"') === 'jet black cat'; // Discards double-quotes; phrase searching doesn't work.
$sanitizer->selectorValue('jet (black cat)') === 'jet (black cat)'; // Phrase searching works.

These effects seem confusing. Is it something that needs to be fixed in ProcessWire, or is there a different way I should be using to sanitise the query string? The documentation recommends surrounding the query text with double-quotes but this doesn’t help with these examples.

We’re using ProcessWire 3.0.164.