How to search for pages with titles starting with a specific phrase? - confluence-rest-api

Question

I'm a little confused as to how I'm supposed to put together the CQL search. Basically, I want to grab all pages that have titles starting with a specific set of strings in that specific order. Example:
Searching for "Test Page" should return:
Test Page
Test Page (1)
Test Page Again
It should NOT return:
Test
Page
Page Test
(1) Test Page
Again Test Page
I tried many searches, like:
title = "Test Page*"
title ~ "Test Page*"
title ~ "Test" AND title ~ "Page*"
But none of them match exactly what I need. What do I need to change to match the start of a title only?
Alternatively, if it's not possible to search for words at the start of a title, I'd be happy if I can just search something like "Test Page (*)", where * would match any character. Then it should return this:
Test Page (1)
Test Page (2)
But not this:
Test Page
Test Page Again
Test
Page
Page Test
(1) Test Page
Again Test Page

Answer 1

For CQL searches that contain an exact string or phrase, you should use the CONTAINS operator and surround the phrase with double quotes as you do in your second example:
title ~ "Test Page*"
CQL also supports the single character wildcard search symbol (?), so for the 'alternate' search you requested, the form should be:
title = "Test Page(?)"
While regular expressions syntax is allowed between back-slashes, I don't see any evidence that there can be selection by beginning (^) or end ($) of the element. However, using the EQULAS operator with the multi-character wildcard should give the same result:
title = "Test Page*"
So, according to all available documentation, including documentation for Apache Lucene upon which CQL is based, you are doing it right. You state that
'none of them match exactly what I need.'
Could you provide more information about why these queries were not correct?