Odd search error. . .

Permalink June 04, 2012 at 9:52 AM

Hello all,
When I use the search feature, it works great.
However, if I search for something that has a "#" sign in it, which some products I'm listing do, I get an error.
It only seems to kick in when the # sign is in the search. If I just search for "#", I get this error:

Warning: preg_match_all() [function.preg-match-all]: Unknown modifier '(' in /path/to/site/blocks/search/controller.php on line 35

However, if I search for something like "Number #1", it's fine. If I search for "Number #2", I get the error—it only happens if I have "#2" in there. If I separate them w/ a space "Number # 2", it's fine too, just something w/ "#2" in it makes the error. But "Number 2", "Number #22" and "Number # 2" all work.

"Number #2" search gives the following error:

Warning: preg_match_all() [function.preg-match-all]: Unknown modifier '2' in /path/to/site/blocks/search/controller.php on line 35

So it appears something about "#2" affects the regex.
Any ideas out there as to what might cause this? Normally, it wouldn't be a big deal, but since I do have products that have "#2" in their name, I'd better look into fixing it just in case.

I'm using c5.5.2.1, and the line it keeps referring to in the search block is:

preg_match_all("#$regex#ui", $text, $matches);

Thanks in advance!

JohntheFish replied on Jun 4, 2012 at 10:33 am Permalink Reply

I have not looked at the code, but a quick guess is that because # is used to delimit the regex, an unescaped # within the search string is terminating the regex early, leaving php to make what it can of any remaining string.

The 'ui' on the end are modifiers to make it case agnostic and unicode compatible.

You could try replacing "#$regex#ui" with "/".$regex."/ui" . In which case '/' becomes the delimiter, so would need to be escaped with '\' if it appeared within the text of $regex.

Another commonly used regex delimiter is '{..}', so you could also code it as "{".$regex."}ui". Same notes as above about escaping.