Issue with $search query values containing whitespace

[awright415]

When I send a request to the server with a $search query that has whitespace, I get an "Unexpected Character" error, unless there's an AND/OR in between. So, in other words, the request fails on phrase queries and implicit AND queries. Examples:

• Works: parser.query("$search=foo AND bar")
• Works: parser.query("$search=\"foo AND bar\"")
• Does not work: parser.query("$search=foo bar")
• Does not work: parser.query("$search=\"foo bar\"")

[lazarv]

Hi @awright415,
the parser is based on the official ABNF and according to it, search phrase and word are:

searchPhrase = quotation-mark 1*qchar-no-AMP-DQUOTE quotation-mark
searchWord   = 1*ALPHA ; Actually: any character from the Unicode categories L or Nl,
                       ; but not the words AND, OR, and NOT

ABNF doesn't allow whitespace in search phrase and encoding needed to work as expected:

parser.query('$search="foo%20bar"')

This works as expected and parsed as a search phrase (because the quotation marks).

{
  position: 8,
  next: 19,
  value: 'foo%20bar',
  type: 'SearchPhrase',
  raw: '"foo%20bar"'
}

[awright415]

Thanks for the quick response! I got thrown off by this section of the protocol spec, which shows a phrase search example with unescaped whitespace.

Ultimately, the trouble I'm having is running $search queries with odata-v4-server, and perhaps I just submitted the wrong issue on the wrong project. I get 500 responses with the same unexpected character error for those requests (and naturally the whitespace is encoded in the URL).

It looks like inside of processor.ts, the URL is already unescaped before it's sent to the parser. So, in that case, wouldn't the parser be trying to parse a $search query value with unencoded whitespace like examples I provided?

[lazarv]

@awright415 - Yes in odata-v4-server the the query is already sent unescaped to the parser. In the 0.1.25 version of odata-v4-parser I modified the lexer to allow whitespace to support unescaped search phrases. Please update from npm and it should be working after.