Why does the search API sometimes return line as "..."?

[samwarring]

Hello, I have found that for some invocations of the /search API, the search would complete succesfully and return matches to the client, but the matches have line set to "...", and lineNumber set to "" (empty string). I found this usually happens when the search string contains "special characters".

For example, I want to search for std::string in my codebase. I need to escape each : character, and I need to enclose the entire search string in quotes, or else the results include the union of std and string. This gives me a search string of "std\:\:string".

• A full search for that string gives correct results.
• A symbol search for that string on the web GUI gives correct results.
• A symbol search for that string using the REST API gives results where line is "..." and lineNumber is "".

Request is: <server address>/api/v1/search?projects=mainline&symbol=%22std%5C%3A%5C%3Astring%22
Response contains many matching files, but each file has one item {line: "...", lineNumber: "", tag: null}.

Unfortunately, I do not have admin access to the OpenGrok instance I'm using, so I cannot provide server logs, but I do know we're using OpenGrok 1.12.14.

Can someone shed light why I am getting these results? Am I invoking the API incorrectly, or is this a bug? Thank you!