How to search on GitHub to get exact string matches, including special characters

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You couldn’t (before 2022). The official GitHub searching rules:

Due to the complexity of searching code, there are a few restrictions
on how searches are performed:

  • Only the default branch is considered. In most cases, this will be the master branch.
  • Only files smaller than 384 KB are searchable.
  • Only repositories with fewer than 500,000 files are searchable.
  • You must always include at least one search term when searching source code. For example, searching for language:go is not valid, while amazing language:go is.
  • At most, search results can show two fragments from the same file, but there may be more results within the file.
  • You can’t use the following wildcard characters as part of your search query:
    . , : ; / \ ` ' " = * ! ? # $ & + ^ | ~ < > ( ) { } [ ]
    The search will simply ignore these symbols.

Update: GitHub supports literal strings now, but you can also try some more powerful ways below.

Try Sourcegraph

For complex search with regex support try Sourcegraph.

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Clone and use git-grep:

git support searching in sources with git-grep command. Just clone a repository and use the command in the folder:

git grep "text-to-search"

Alternatives:

I recommend you to try ripgrep tool, it’s fast and simple. Works like git-grep but looks nicer:

rg "text-to-search"

And you can use the standard grep to search any text in files:

grep -r "text-to-search" /repository

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