String representation of SearchQuery gives inaccurate results

[Alex Krupp]

For the purpose of writing tests, I'm trying to use the string representation of SearchQuery to see what query statements my querystring parser is generating.

When I do print(~SearchQuery('asdf')), instead of seeing "~SearchQuery('asdf')" I instead see "SearchQuery('asdf')". In other words, the tilde that is used to negate the SearchQuery isn't being shown.

Similarly, if I do:

query = SearchQuery('a') & ( SearchQuery('b') | SearchQuery('c') )

When I do print(query) I just see "SearchQuery('a') & SearchQuery('b') | SearchQuery('c')". The issue here is that the parentheses used to group these statements aren't shown, which again changes the meaning of this statement.

[Tim Graham]

It might be feasible to fix, I'm not sure.

[Tom Forbes]

I've got a good fix for the negation, and a 'not sure if this a good idea' fix for the grouping. PR: ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/10276

For the grouping we could fix it quite elegantly by always surrounding CombinedSearchQuery's in (), but this would mean the example above would result in:

(SearchQuery('a') & SearchQuery('b') | SearchQuery('c'))

[Alex Krupp]

That seems like a good fix to me. I don't foresee much use for this outside of writing tests. E.g. if you were going to log user searches so that they were viewable in the admin or whatever, presumably you'd log what the user typed rather than the parsed query. To the extent that you'd want to log the parsed queries I think it would only be for compliance purposes, but this would be fine for that since even with the parentheses you can still re-run the query and get the same results just by copying and pasting.

[Tom Forbes]

Replying to Alex Krupp:

That seems like a good fix to me. I don't foresee much use for this outside of writing tests. E.g. if you were going to log user searches so that they were viewable in the admin or whatever, presumably you'd log what the user typed rather than the parsed query. To the extent that you'd want to log the parsed queries I think it would only be for compliance purposes, but this would be fine for that since even with the parentheses you can still re-run the query and get the same results just by copying and pasting.

You might not be able to get the exact same results. One thing that's not easy to fix (as far as I can see) are the quotation marks. So in my example above it would more accurately be:

(SearchQuery(a) & SearchQuery(b) | SearchQuery(c))

I'm not sure if I like the extra parentheses around the query, it does make it harder to read. But on the other hand it does make the implementation simpler.

[Tim Graham <timograham@…>]

In a3df757:

Fixed #29644 -- Made SearchQuery.str() reflect negation and grouping.