List filters do not match exact value

[miltondp]

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• [X] I have searched the docs, existing issues, and existing discussions for answers first.

Link to your website repo

https://github.com/pivlab/pivlab-website

Version of Lab Website Template you are using

1.2.0

Description

I created this PR on my lab's website repo to change the order in which lab members are shown. I found that the filters parameter of the List component does not match values exactly; instead, it looks for substrings. For instance, if you have two roles in _data/types.yaml named programmer and programmer-lab, a filter with role: programmer will match both.

This could be fixed by changing the documentation of the List component.

This is how I fixed the bug (see $ at the end of role in second line):

{% include list.html data="members" component="portrait" filters="role: programmer-lab, group: " %}
{% include list.html data="members" component="portrait" filters="role: programmer$, group: " %}

[vincerubinetti]

I will update the documentation about this. Originally I planned to have plain strings be exact matches but at some point I removed that and forgot to update the documentation.

Unfortunately, the filter always receives a plain string (because it comes from liquid/jekyll which doesn't have a special type for regex) and then has to decide whether to treat it as an exact match or regex somehow. I guess I could try to check for if the string contains special regex characters like + or *, but that could be brittle. It's probably best to just always treat it like a regex, and thus a plain string like "lab" would just be a partial match, and you'd have to do ^lab$ for an exact match.

[miltondp]

I agree!

On Wed, Apr 17, 2024, 1:29 PM Vincent Rubinetti @.***> wrote:

I will update the documentation about this. Originally I planned to have plain strings be exact matches but at some point I removed that and forgot to update the documentation.

Unfortunately, the filter always receives either a plain string and then has to decide whether to treat it as an exact match or regex somehow. I guess I could try to check for if the string contains special regex characters like + or *, but that could be brittle. It's probably best to just always treat it like a regex, and thus a plain string like "lab" would just be a partial match.

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[vincerubinetti]

Fixed with https://github.com/greenelab/lab-website-template-docs/commit/0d93949d4adb98301114a255edf6e83a858007c3