Escaping path includes

[edalfon]

Hey everyone,

Thx for a great plugin.

I am struggling to solve this. I have a simple query to filter the tasks from some files.

not done
(path includes foo/bar/toy.md)

That works fine 99% of the time. But, unfortunately, sometimes the files I want to get the tasks from, include special characters, such as parenthesis. So I end up with something like this:

not done
(path includes foo/bar/(toy).md)

Which just throws an error: Tasks query: malformed boolean query -- Invalid token (check the documentation for guidelines)

I naively tried to simply escape those characters, like this:

not done
(path includes foo/bar/\(toy\).md)

But that does not work. I have tried using single and double quotation marks, and any other way I could think of, to escape those especial characters, but couldn't find a way to solve the issue.

Any ideas how to deal with this?

Thanks in advance!

[claremacrae]

Sure.

Instead of this:

not done
# fails, because the brackets around the line confuse it (due to a known bug)
(path includes foo/bar/(toy).md)

Do this:

not done
path includes foo/bar/(toy).md

With a single query on a line, you aren't writing a Boolean query, so don't put the brackets around the line.

[edalfon]

Hi. many thank for your answer, which clearly works for the example I put in there.

But trying to keep the example as short as possible, perhaps I oversimplified it. Because I do actually need a Boolean query in my use case, which basically involves a bunch of ORs to include tasks from a number of different files. So it looks rather like this.

not done
(path includes foo/bar/(toy).md) OR (path includes foo/bar/good.md)

I understand that single line queries are combined as ANDs, so I cannot simply use them and I am stuck with the parenthesis to express the boolean query.

Is there any workaround?

[claremacrae]

Thanks for clarifying.

Any workarounds are listed in the following, where we are tracking this issue:

• Allow parenthesis to be used in search strings in boolean filters #1308

[claremacrae]

Also this:

• malformed boolean query for valid regex search that includes () #1500

[claremacrae]

In Tasks 7.0.0 I rewrote the Boolean filter code - and it fixes the problems described above.

The release page summarises the changes, and contains some useful links to help you update your searches, if you have not already done so:

https://github.com/obsidian-tasks-group/obsidian-tasks/releases/tag/7.0.0