topic Re: how do you pass square brackets in form inputs? in Dashboards & Visualizations

how do you pass square brackets in form inputs?

cphair — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 15:16:41 GMT

I have a field that contains square brackets, and I can't get my dashboard to search on it properly when it's used in an input token. It keeps telling me no results are found. The search works fine from the search bar, and the token value is being populated as I would expect in the URL (with the brackets encoded of course), so I'm guessing something is funny with the token interpolation. Is there some special way I need to handle brackets? I've tried escaping them with the backslash (multiple times), using their HTML encoding value, trying to escape with quotes...no luck.

Example:
<pre><choice value="foo[bar]">Foo Bar</choice></pre>

Re: how do you pass square brackets in form inputs?

woodcock — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 19:15:20 GMT

Did you try using double-quotes around the token name in your search string like this:

index=blah myField="$fooBarToken$"

Re: how do you pass square brackets in form inputs?

cphair — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 12:22:48 GMT

Yes, it is already enclosed in quotes. I've had to do that for tokens with special characters before, but the brackets seem to be really confusing something.

Re: how do you pass square brackets in form inputs?

woodcock — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 13:01:47 GMT

Did you try single-quotes?

Re: how do you pass square brackets in form inputs?

cphair — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 13:13:31 GMT

Yes--no luck.

Re: how do you pass square brackets in form inputs?

woodcock — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 13:47:34 GMT

OK, let's go hardcore and try thiese:

index=blah | where match(myField, "^$fooBarToken$$")
index=blah | where match(myField, "$fooBarToken$")
index=blah | where like(myField, "$fooBarToken$")

Also try swapping double-quotes for single-quotes. One of these should work.

Re: how do you pass square brackets in form inputs?

cphair — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 17:22:26 GMT

Ugh, it ended up being an error earlier in the search--nothing to do with the brackets. Printing out the field values like you suggested below showed it up. Thanks for your help.

Re: how do you pass square brackets in form inputs?

woodcock — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 17:48:27 GMT

OK, well you have it now!