Internal Plugin search will not find plugin names with a forward slash in them

[prophecy2040]

Migrated from ​https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/30231

Apologies if this was reported previously - I could not find anything relevant.

I am a plugin developer and one of my plugin names is called "Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin". I have recently had some users tell me that they cannot find the plugin when using the 'Add New' plugin search feature inside WordPress. I checked this out and it does come up, BUT not when you use the actual full name (with the '/' - forward slash). If you take it out, it shows up.

So looking through the plugin development documentation, I cannot find anything where is says not to include a forward slash in the name of the plugin. So my conclusion is that this is a bug of some sort, as the search process is possibly converting the forward slash to an encoded character which will not match the title of the plugin - so it does not return a result.

To recreate, try searching "Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin" and nothing will return. When you search "Quick PagePost Redirect Plugin" (without the /) the plugin will be listed.

The plugin was created a long time ago, and the name has not changed since inception. I tested in 3.8, 3.9 and 4.0 with the same results.

If this is not a bug, there needs to be more clear instruction on Plugin naming conventions, so that developers will know not to use certain characters in their naming so users can find the plugin correctly.

Don Fischer

Followup comment by SergeyBiryukov: ​https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/30231#comment:1

Reproduced with the search form in the plugin directory as well:

• Searching for ​Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin does not display the plugin.
• Searching for ​Quick PagePost Redirect Plugin does.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Removing 'needs-patch' from components that are not open sourced yet, to help focus on tickets that actually need a patch.

[ocean90]

Found the cause, trying to fix it now.

[ocean90]

That was a fun one, fixed in [dotorg11502].