Text Search
YouTrack lets you search for issues that contain one or more words. You can either search for text in all issue attributes, or limit the search query to find text in the issue summary, description, or comments. You can also limit the search to search for words in lines of code. For more information, see Search Attributes.
Text search is case insensitive.
Stemming
If text indexing is enabled for the language that you use in YouTrack, related words are mapped to a common stem word.
When you search for text, YouTrack returns issues that contain all forms of the words that you enter in a search query.
For example, the search query description: {search attribute} returns not only issues that contain either the words 'search' or 'attribute' in the description,
but also any issue that contains other forms of these words, including 'searches', 'searched', 'searching', 'attributes', 'attribution', and so on.
This feature helps you locate issues that might otherwise be excluded if the results included only exact word matches.
Tokenization
YouTrack breaks down each word in a string of text into tokens. All contiguous strings of alphabetic or numeric characters are part of one token. When you search for multiple words, the query is interpreted as a string of tokens.
- When the words are set in braces, each token is evaluated separately. The search results include all issues that contain any words that match any token in the query.
- When the words are set in quotation marks, the tokens are evaluated as a sequence. The search results include only issues that contain words that match all tokens in the specified order.
YouTrack returns issues that contain the words that correspond to the tokens that are specified in the search. The text in an issue is broken down into words. Whitespaces and punctuation are used to determine where the words begin and end. Periods and underscores are also recognized as delimiters.
Using Text Search
- To find issues that contain all forms for a specific word, enter the word in the search query.
- To find issues that contain multiple key words in any order, set the words in braces. YouTrack returns any issue that contains any form of either word in the specified attribute.
- To find issues that contain multiple words in a specific order, set the text in quotation marks. YouTrack returns only issues that contain matching forms for all of the specified words in the order that they appear in the query.
Wildcards
You can use wildcards as a placeholder for one or more characters.
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 words are removed to improve query performance. When you enter a stop word in a search query, it is ignored. Stop words are not highlighted in the search results. The following stop words are ignored by YouTrack:
| a | an | and | are | as | at | be | but | by | for | if |
| in | into | is | it | no | not | of | on | or | such | that |
| the | their | then | there | these | they | this | to | was | will | with |
Fuzzy Search
To find words that match an approximate pattern, instead of an exact pattern, use a fuzzy search. Fuzzy search finds words that are just a few characters off from the word that is specified in the search query. This technique helps you account for misspellings, partial words, and slight differences in names.
For example, the search query comments: {michael~} returns issues that include not only the name Michael in the comments, but also other spellings like Mikhail.
Fuzzy matching usually returns a large number of irrelevant matches Use this option only when you know that the word you are searching for is likely to be misspelled.
Search Results
The list of issues that is displayed when you use full text search highlights all of the word forms that match the words that are specified in the query.
When you search for a sequence of words set in quotes, the query returns only issues that contain forms for each word in the specified order. Word forms that match any of the specified words are highlighted in the results. At first glance, you may think that the search has returned issues that don't match your query. If you open each issue, however, you can see that the issue contains the sequence of words that match your search criteria.
If your text search returns too many issues, use additional search parameters to limit the results to a specific project, subsystem, or issue type. You can also limit the results to show issues that include the text in the summary, description, or comments.