Searching using special characters

[ClemensSchneider]

Hi there,

the artist '-M-' can be found when searching via the Spotify desktop-client but I cannot find it when searching using the web-api:

https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/console/get-search-item/?q=%22-M-%22&type=artist

https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/console/get-search-item/?q=-M-&type=artist

Is there anything to take special care of in this case?

[arska]

The same problem with "Sixx:A.M." (spotify:artist:3886aFez2HDLkio5tUzmP6) https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/console/get-search-item/?q=Sixx%3AA.M.&type=artist

[thelinmichael]

For future reference, it's indeed not possible to find these artists by querying for their artist names. Thanks @ClemensSchneider and @arska.

[hughrawlinson]

Hey, it's not possible to search for the artist '-M-', sorry. I'll keep this ticket open as a bug.

@arska - you can search for the artist "Sixx:A.M." by lowercasing all of the characters. We've discovered an issue where search doesn't work with uppercase characters, we're investigating and we hope to solve it soon. In the mean time, you can lowercase the search term 😄

[rognod]

I was just about to open a new issue, but I'll just post it here.

I tried searching for Send Me To District 2 - From "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2" Soundtrack (or any track from the album, with ID 61uE8fWhwEf4pFJV26jaZT) but didn't get a result. So I fiddled around a bit, tried searching lowercase, which didn't help. From the documentation I knew that Keywords will be matched in any order unless surrounded by double quotation marks That's a bit of a problem here, because the quotes are part of the name. I just left them out for testing, but still didn't get a result. Next I removed both : and ,. That's where I found something. If I take either of those back into the search query, I get an empty result.

Is there a way to escape them? I tried \, but it didn't help. I would assume then, that this bug is not yet fixed? Thanks for any help!

[idelsink]

So, when will this be fixed? I want to search, for example, the artist !!! (https://open.spotify.com/artist/1mmehjf7eHA10uHMisZGJg?si=az9VTSEhQKKQqpZVakGcHQ). But I can't?

! is not really a special character. Yes it's not a alphanumeric character, but it's just a normal ASCII character. Will this bug ever be fixed? This issue was made +2 years ago. This is a pretty basic and important part of the Web API.

[raskutti]

+1 for searching non-alphanumeric characters like !

[hubgit]

As an example of one of many searches that are failing to locate albums with non-word characters, I'm trying to search for the album >>> by BEAK> but the search API returns 0 results for album:>>> or album:">>>".

[hubgit]

It may be worth noting that in the desktop client a search for !!! returns the correct artist, but a search for artist:!!! unexpectedly acts like a search for the string artist.

[idelsink]

It may be worth noting that in the desktop client a search for !!! returns the correct artist, but a search for artist:!!! unexpectedly acts like a search for the string artist.

+1 for Chk Chk Chk