Make workshop text field searches ignore punctuation (hyphens, ampersands, periods, dashes, quotes) by Copilot · Pull Request #737 · rubyforgood/awbw

Copilot · 2026-01-20T01:05:23Z

What is the goal of this PR and why is this important?

Improve punctuation-agnostic searching so more workshops are found

What works

Punctuation stripping (20 characters)

All of these are ignored in both DB values and search input: - & . — – " ' ' ' " " / : + ! ? , ( ) …

Hyphen/space/joined variants (all combos match)

Search ↓ / DB →	`self-care`	`self care`	`selfcare`
`self-care`	spaced ✅	spaced ✅	spaceless ✅
`self care`	spaced ✅	spaced ✅	spaceless ✅
`selfcare`	spaceless ✅	spaceless ✅	spaceless ✅

Synonym expansion

More examples

Search targets

Workshop title and full_name (native columns) ✅
All Rhino rich text content via action_text_rich_texts.plain_text_body ✅
Case insensitive (MySQL utf8mb4_unicode_ci collation) ✅

What doesn't work

Word order: "crafts arts" won't find "Arts & Crafts" — LIKE requires sequential substring match
Searching for punctuation itself: Can't specifically find all workshops containing & since it gets stripped
Spaceless false positives (rare): DB "the art" → spaceless "theart" could match search "hear" since t[hear]t is a substring
No index usage: Full table scans due to REPLACE() wrapping + leading % wildcards (fine at 700-3k workshops)

Original ai description

This PR makes workshop searches ignore punctuation in both user input and workshop data, improving search usability. Users can now find workshops regardless of punctuation variations in titles or text content (e.g., "self-care" vs "selfcare", "Arts & Crafts" vs "Arts Crafts", "Dr. Workshop" vs "Dr Workshop", "The 'Best' Workshop" vs "The Best Workshop").

How did you approach the change?

PunctuationStrippable Concern: Created a reusable concern with helper methods to centralize punctuation stripping logic:
- strip_punctuation_sql(field_name) - generates nested SQL REPLACE functions for database queries
- strip_punctuation(text) - strips punctuation from Ruby strings
Workshop Model: Includes the PunctuationStrippable concern and modified the title scope to use the helper methods for stripping punctuation from both search input and database fields, with proper SQL injection protection via sanitize_sql_like
WorkshopSearchService: Includes the PunctuationStrippable concern and updated filter_by_query method to use the helper methods for custom SQL that strips punctuation from search queries and applies to all searchable workshop fields (title, full_name, objective, materials, setup, introduction, demonstration, etc., including Spanish variants)
Tests: Added comprehensive RSpec tests for punctuation-ignoring behavior in both title searches and full-text query searches with various punctuation types

Anything else to add?

The implementation ensures bidirectional matching for 11 types of punctuation:

Hyphens: -, --
Ampersands: &
Periods: .
Em dashes: —
En dashes: –
Double quotes: ", ", "
Single quotes: ', ', '

Examples:

Searching "Arts Crafts" finds workshops titled "Arts & Crafts"
Searching "Dr Workshop" finds workshops titled "Dr. Workshop"
Searching "HelloGoodbye" finds workshops titled "Hello—Goodbye" or "Hello–Goodbye"
Searching "The Best Workshop" finds workshops titled "The 'Best' Workshop"

All security checks passed with no vulnerabilities introduced. The refactoring into a reusable concern improves code maintainability and ensures consistency between the Workshop model and WorkshopSearchService.

Original prompt

This section details on the original issue you should resolve

<issue_title>Make workshop text field searches ignore hyphens</issue_title>
<issue_description>Need to be stripped out of user input, and also adjust the workshop data against which it's being compared.</issue_description>

<agent_instructions>adjust the workshops index workshop search service to ignore matching against hyphens, esp in the workshop title.

so, if a user inputs "hello -- goodbye" into the search field, it'll find workshops w title (or text, depending on search field) "hello goodbye"
and, if a user inputs "hello goodbye" into the search field, it'll find workshop w title (or text, depending on search field) "hello - goodbye"</agent_instructions>

Comments on the Issue (you are @copilot in this section)

Fixes Make workshop text field searches ignore hyphens #463

✨ Let Copilot coding agent set things up for you — coding agent works faster and does higher quality work when set up for your repo.

maebeale · 2026-01-27T17:28:51Z

@copilot would you start again?

Copilot · 2026-01-27T17:35:23Z

@copilot would you start again?

I've implemented the hyphen-ignoring search functionality. The changes are in commit 5c9261a.

What was changed:

Modified the title scope in Workshop model to strip hyphens from both search input and database fields using SQL REPLACE
Updated filter_by_query in WorkshopSearchService to use custom SQL that strips hyphens from all searchable workshop fields
Added comprehensive tests for both title and query searches

How it works:

Searching "hello goodbye" now finds workshops titled "hello - goodbye"
Searching "hello -- goodbye" now finds workshops titled "hello goodbye"
Works bidirectionally for title searches and full-text query searches across all workshop text fields

All security checks passed with no vulnerabilities found.

maebeale · 2026-02-15T07:02:16Z

@copilot make it also correctly match titles with ampersand, periods, em dash, en dash, and quotes

Copilot · 2026-02-15T07:07:53Z

@copilot make it also correctly match titles with ampersand, periods, em dash, en dash, and quotes

I've extended the search to ignore ampersands, periods, em dashes, en dashes, and quotes in addition to hyphens. Changes are in commits 5074556 and f92cb34.

What was added:

Ampersands: &
Periods: .
Em dashes: —
En dashes: –
Various quote types: ", ', ', ', ", "

Implementation:

Created a reusable PunctuationStrippable concern with helper methods
Updated both title and query searches to strip all these punctuation characters
Added comprehensive tests for each punctuation type

Examples:

"Arts Crafts" now finds "Arts & Crafts"
"Dr Workshop" now finds "Dr. Workshop"
"HelloGoodbye" now finds "Hello—Goodbye" or "Hello–Goodbye"
"The Best Workshop" now finds "The 'Best' Workshop"

All security checks passed with no vulnerabilities.

… speeds

maebeale · 2026-02-15T17:39:47Z

app/models/workshop.rb

    ) #{sort_order == "asc" ? "ASC" : "DESC"}
    SQL
  end
-  scope :title, ->(title) { where("workshops.title like ?", "%#{ title }%") }


remove dupe

maebeale · 2026-02-15T17:40:13Z

app/services/workshop_search_service.rb

  def filter_by_title
    return unless params[:title].present?
-    @workshops = @workshops.search("title:#{params[:title]}")
+    @workshops = @workshops.title(params[:title])


stop using SearchCop for title search so we can instead apply this stripped chars version of searching.

Copilot AI assigned Copilot and maebeale Jan 20, 2026

Copilot started work on behalf of maebeale January 20, 2026 01:19 View session

Copilot AI requested a review from maebeale January 20, 2026 01:20

Copilot started work on behalf of maebeale January 27, 2026 17:29 View session

Copilot AI changed the title ~~[WIP] Make workshop text field searches ignore hyphens~~ Make workshop text field searches ignore hyphens Jan 27, 2026

Copilot finished work on behalf of maebeale January 27, 2026 17:36

Copilot started work on behalf of maebeale February 15, 2026 07:02 View session

Copilot AI changed the title ~~Make workshop text field searches ignore hyphens~~ Make workshop text field searches ignore punctuation (hyphens, ampersands, periods, dashes, quotes) Feb 15, 2026

Copilot finished work on behalf of maebeale February 15, 2026 07:08

maebeale added 2 commits February 15, 2026 12:14

WIP: punctuation agnostic

75e71ab

update claude

64cbab0

maebeale force-pushed the copilot/adjust-workshop-search-hyphen-logic branch from f92cb34 to 64cbab0 Compare February 15, 2026 17:14

Strip puncutation from searches and add index to bookmarks to improve…

344cc72

… speeds

maebeale reviewed Feb 15, 2026

View reviewed changes

maebeale marked this pull request as ready for review February 15, 2026 17:49

maebeale added 6 commits February 15, 2026 13:07

Set up claude to autorun rubocop

2bf1425

Update workshop searching to be punctuation agnostic

771d9a3

Add extra searching to find more variations using the word and

9ec7e3f

Correctly look for person name if user when doing author search

11e5981

Avoid brakeman error

d35fdff

Claude can check brakeman

f836a79

maebeale merged commit 4868c31 into main Feb 15, 2026
4 of 5 checks passed

maebeale deleted the copilot/adjust-workshop-search-hyphen-logic branch February 15, 2026 18:56

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Make workshop text field searches ignore punctuation (hyphens, ampersands, periods, dashes, quotes)#737

Make workshop text field searches ignore punctuation (hyphens, ampersands, periods, dashes, quotes)#737
maebeale merged 9 commits intomainfrom
copilot/adjust-workshop-search-hyphen-logic

Copilot AI commented Jan 20, 2026 •

edited by maebeale

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maebeale commented Jan 27, 2026

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Copilot AI commented Jan 20, 2026 • edited by maebeale Loading Uh oh! There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

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What is the goal of this PR and why is this important?

What works

Punctuation stripping (20 characters)

Hyphen/space/joined variants (all combos match)

Synonym expansion

More examples

Search targets

What doesn't work

Original ai description

How did you approach the change?

Anything else to add?

Comments on the Issue (you are @copilot in this section)

Uh oh!

maebeale commented Jan 27, 2026

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Copilot AI commented Jan 27, 2026

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maebeale commented Feb 15, 2026

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Copilot AI commented Feb 15, 2026

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maebeale Feb 15, 2026

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Copilot AI commented Jan 20, 2026 •

edited by maebeale

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