Talk:Discovery/Handling question marks in search queries

Feedback on proposed change

• Final I agree with the proposed change to remove ending question marks. I also agree that there should be a way to escape this removal if desired, such as using '\?' to indicate that one question mark should remain at the end, or '\?\?' for two. Mamyles (talk) 21:57, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
• Thanks for looking into this. I think it's fine to sometimes ignore the question mark; the wildcard is nice but hardly necessary, especially as long as regex search is available. Nemo 19:34, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
• Final - strip all question marks and spaces from the end of search strings (and possibly the beginning as well). Kaldari (talk) 19:51, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
• Question: How difficult would it be to make "Cruise?" match "Cruise" as well as what it matches at the moment? Jarry1250 (talk) 08:38, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
  • We have * which matches 0 or more letters, so cruise* will match cruise, cruiser, cruiserweight, etc. Would that work for your queries? Or are you trying to come up with a way to help novice users? If so, then for novice users I think it would still be confusing because lots of additional unexpected matches would be in the results (which is better than what we have now in many cases, though). For expert users who use the regex (of which there are admittedly very few), it would change the standard meaning of the ?/* regex syntax used, for example, on the bash command line. I'm not sure how hard it would be to implement your suggestion, but it wouldn't be super easy, alas. We'd have to dig around and figure out where and how the regexes are handled. The current proposal doesn't require digging too deep into the particularly gnarly code that parses and processes queries. TJones (WMF) (talk) 14:35, 8 July 2016 (UTC)