OpenLayers.Filter.Comparison.LIKE doesn't filter special characters!

Question

it seems like OpenLayers.Filter.Comparison.LIKE doesn't filter special characters! for example,

filter = new OpenLayers.Filter.Comparison({ 
    type: OpenLayers.Filter.Comparison.LIKE, 
    property: 'name', 
        value: 'blue' 
    }) 

this will work fine. but:

filter = new OpenLayers.Filter.Comparison({ 
    type: OpenLayers.Filter.Comparison.LIKE, 
    property: 'name', 
        value: 'light-blue' 
    }) 

this will cause an error because of the -

it also can't deal with dots

what can I do to fix that ?

EDIT

I tried:

var filter = new OpenLayers.Filter.Comparison(
  { type: OpenLayers.Filter.Comparison.LIKE,
    property: 'name',
    value: input }
);
filter.value2regex( "-","." ); 

I wanted to escape those two characters from any value. but nothing changes.

Answer 1

You can use an escape character in your filter to 'hide' special characters. The docs aren't very clear but it looks like the default escape character is !

In an ideal world you could just set the the single and multiple wild cards to something that doesn't occur in your strings but there doesn't seem to be an option for that :-(

Answer 2

I could not found a problem in my tests with the "light-blue" value.

var filter = new OpenLayers.Filter.Comparison(
  { type: OpenLayers.Filter.Comparison.LIKE, property: 'name', value: 'light-blue' }
);
filter.evaluate( { name: 'light-blue' } );

The value property is a regexp string. You could reference the javascript documentation for valid values: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/RegExp .

So if you want to match the literal character "-" you could add escapes to your regexp:

var filter = new OpenLayers.Filter.Comparison(
  { type: OpenLayers.Filter.Comparison.LIKE, property: 'name', value: 'light\\-blue' }
);
filter.evaluate( { name: 'light-blue' } );