Search for Articles

Standard Text Search

Any input that doesn't contain special characters is parsed as standard text search. Standard text search is case insensitive.

Follow these guidelines to search for text in articles:

• Enter a single term to find articles that contain matching forms for this word.

  If the language has been indexed, YouTrack also returns articles that contain morphological variants of the specified word or words.

• Enter multiple words to find articles that contain all the specified words in any order.

• Use wildcards to expand the text search to include characters that do not exactly match your search criteria.

  For more information, see Wildcards in Text Search.

If standard text search doesn't return the article you were looking for, try one of the following strategies:

• Set words, phrases, or strings of characters in single quotes.

  This syntax returns articles that contain exact matches for the specified string. To learn more, see Exact Match Search.

• Set single terms in quotation marks to find articles that contain exact matches for the specified word form.

  To learn more about how YouTrack handles searches that contain single terms, see Searching for Single Terms.

• Set multiple terms in quotation marks to find articles that contain words as a phrase.

  A phrase is defined as a consecutive grouping of word forms that match the text in the search query and appear in the same order. If the phrase contains a stop word, the stop word is replaced by any word in the article.

  To learn more about how YouTrack searches for phrases, see Searching for Phrases.

Exact Match Search

You can search for articles that contain exact matches for an arbitrary string of characters.

This string can be anything from a particular word form to a sequence of random characters. This type of search ignores morphological variants for specified words, stemming, phrases, stop words, and other natural language features that are supported in standard text search.

Unlike standard text search queries, exact match search is case-sensitive.

To find articles that contain exact matches for a specified string, wrap the search string in single quotes.

Searching for Single Terms

To find articles that contain a word in a particular form, set the single term in quotation marks. With this syntax, the search results only contain exact matches for the specified word form. Other forms of the specified word are excluded from the results.

Searching for Phrases

YouTrack processes searches for multiple terms that are set in quotation marks as a phrase. Articles that are returned by a phrase search contain matching forms for all the words that are specified in the query that appear in the specified order.

If you enter a stop word in a phrase, it's handled as if it were a wildcard and can be replaced by any word in the search results. For more information, see Stop Words.

The search results for queries that specify a phrase will contain morphological variations for each word in the phrase.

Wildcards in Text Search

You can use wildcards as a placeholder for one or more characters.

• * — matches zero or more characters in a string. You can also use this wildcard at the end of a value in an attribute-based search.

• ? — matches any single character in a string.

You can use a wildcard at the beginning, middle, or end of any word.

Stop Words

If you use English as the default language in YouTrack, there are a number of common words that are filtered out before the search query is processed. These are called stop words. These words are removed to improve query performance. Stop words are handled as follows:

• If you use a stop word as a single search term, it is ignored.

• If you enter a stop word in a phrase, it's handled as if it were a wildcard and can be replaced by any word in the search results.

• Stop words are not highlighted in the search results.

The following stop words are ignored by YouTrack:

Syntax for Attribute-based Search

Each article has a number of attributes, such as project, author, article ID, and tag. In turn, each attribute has a value. When you search, you specify the attribute that you want to check and the value that is currently assigned to the articles you want to find.

Use the following guidelines to compose an attribute-based search query:

The key to mastering attribute-based search is knowing which attributes contain the values that are relevant to the articles you want to find. For a complete list of attributes that are supported in search queries, see Article Attributes.

Article Attributes

Every article has base attributes that are set automatically by YouTrack. These include the article ID, the user who created or applied the last update to the article, and so on.

Attribute-based search uses the syntax attribute: value.

• You can specify multiple values for the target attribute, separated by commas.

• Exclude specific values from the search results with the syntax attribute: -value.

Sort Attributes

You can specify the sort order for the list of articles that are returned by the search query. You can sort articles by any of the attributes on the following list.

Symbols

The following symbols can be used to extend or refine a search query.

Date and Period Values

Several search attributes reference values that are stored as a date. You can search for dates as single values or use a range of values to define a period.

Specify dates in the format: YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM or MM-DD. You also can specify a time in 24h format: HH:MM:SS or HH:MM. To specify both date and time, use the format: YYYY-MM-DD}}T{{HH:MM:SS. For example, the search query created: 2010-01-01T12:00 .. 2010-01-01T15:00 returns all articles that were created on 1 January 2010 between 12:00 and 15:00.

Predefined Relative Date Parameters

You can also use pre-defined relative parameters to search for date values. The values for these parameters are calculated relative to the current date according to the time zone of the current user. The actual value for each parameter is shown in the query assist panel.

The following relative date parameters are supported:

Parameter	Description
Now	The current instant.
Today	The current calendar day.
Tomorrow	The next calendar day.
Yesterday	The previous calendar day.
Sunday	The calendar Sunday for the current week.
Monday	The calendar Monday for the current week.
Tuesday	The calendar Tuesday for the current week.
Wednesday	The calendar Wednesday for the current week.
Thursday	The calendar Thursday for the current week.
Friday	The calendar Friday for the current week.
Saturday	The calendar Saturday for the current week.
{Last working day}	The most recent working day as defined by the Workdays that are configured in the settings on the Time Tracking page in YouTrack.
{This week}	The period from 00:00 Monday to 23:59 Sunday for the current week.
{Last week}	The period from 00:00 Monday to 23:59 Sunday for the previous week.
{Next week}	The period from 00:00 Monday to 23:59 Sunday for the next week.
{Two weeks ago}	The period from 00:00 Monday to 23:59 Sunday for the calendar week two weeks prior to the current date.
{Three weeks ago}	The period from 00:00 Monday to 23:59 Sunday for the calendar week three weeks prior to the current date.
{This month}	The period from the first day to the last day of the current calendar month.
{Last month}	The period from the first day to the last day of the previous calendar month.
{Next month}	The period from the first day to the last day of the next calendar month.
Older	The period from 1 January 1970 to the last day of the month two months prior to the current date.