Update: I found this question https://answers.splunk.com/answers/610037/my-search-string-is-truncated-after-a-question-mar.html that correctly identified the culprit as question mark ?
.
If I want to do regex in drilldown, the link returns "Unbalanced quotes"; search windows shows the search as cut off at the first left parenthesis, even though the URL appears to contain the full string. The only difference I can see is that the URL contains something like q=sourcetype=%22mytype%22
instead of q=sourcetype%3D%22awx_json%22
, i.e., all equal signs in the search is no longer encoded. If I do not have parenthesis after pipe, the drilldown automatically encodes equal sign. (Even so, it is not obvious why the resultant search window shows a cutoff at parenthesis.)
Additionally, if I urldecode the string, the resultant search is still invalid because the time range, as specified in tokens, gets attached to the last filter (with ampersands - instead of inserting into the first search command) which renders the last filter invalid.
Obviously this can be worked around by hard encoding, perhaps even hard code time range tokens, too. But this behavior is very undesirable.
Looks like @sabirmgd reported this a year ago in https://answers.splunk.com/answers/610037/my-search-string-is-truncated-after-a-question-mar.html and @mayurr98 diagnosed it correctly. The problem is in question mark, not in parenthesis. (The equal sign encoding is still odd.)