[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 42097] Formula: Search criteria fail with parenthesis and brackets characters

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42097

Christopher Alby <ccalby at mailbag.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
           Severity|normal                      |major
                 CC|                            |ccalby at mailbag.com
              Alias|                            |ChrisAlby
            Summary|match function fails with   |Formula: Search criteria
                   |brackets ()                 |fail with parenthesis and
                   |                            |brackets characters

--- Comment #1 from Christopher Alby <ccalby at mailbag.com> 2011-10-25 13:11:23 PDT ---
I don't know what the proper procedure is here, but I would like to contribute
the following additional information to this bug report:

Formula error:  Search strings containing parenthesis and bracket characters
fail to return a match, i.e., the following characters do not work as search
criteria: ( ) [ ]

e.g., if cell A1 contains:

  this (is) [a] test

and cell A2 contains:

  =COUNTIF(S7,"this (is) [a] test")

the result of A2's formula is returned as 0 when is should be 1.  Escaping the
characters with single quotes gave the same result, e.g.:  =COUNTIF(S7,"this
'('is')' '['a']' test").

This behavior is present for both literal and referenced strings.

I found this with the COUNTIF and VLOOKUP functions, but would speculate that
it is probably effecting any or most database, reference, lookup, search and
some mathematical functions.

The following characters do seem to work and might be used in workarounds:
angle and curly brackets, i.e., < > { }

I tested this using Mac OS X 10.5.8 on a G5 Power PC (PPC) platform running
LibreOffice LibreOffice 3.4.3, OOO340m1 (Build:302)

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