Last updated Jul 3, 2025

Performing text searches using CQL

This page provides information on how to perform text searches. It applies to advanced searches when used with the CONTAINS operator.

**Acknowledgments:** Confluence uses Apache Lucene for text indexing, which provides a rich query language. Much of the information on this page is derived from the [Query Parser Syntax](http://lucene.apache.org/core/4_4_0/queryparser/org/apache/lucene/queryparser/classic/package-summary.html#Term_Modifiers) page of the Lucene documentation.

Query terms

A query is broken up into terms and operators. There are two types of terms: Single Terms and Phrases.

All query terms in Confluence are case insensitive. For example, searching the query term Foo or foo will give the same result.

Single Term

A Single Term is a single word such as "test" or "hello".

Phrase

A Phrase is a group of words surrounded by double quotes such as "hello dolly". To find exact matches for phrase "hello dolly", you need to enclose the whole phrase in quotation-marks ("). Otherwise, the search will return all issues that contain both words in no particular order - this would include "hello dolly", but also "hello world dolly".

If you’re using the advanced search feature, you also need to escape each of the quotation marks with a backslash (\). For details, refer to the following examples.

Examples

Advanced search: Find all content where the text contains the words "hello" and the word "dolly", in no particular order.

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text ~ "hello dolly"

Advanced search: Find all content where the text contains the exact phrase "hello dolly":

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text ~ "\"hello dolly\""

If you’re searching by typing a CQL URL in your browser address bar, please encode the back slash in html `%5c`. For example: https://mysite.atlassian.net/wiki/rest/api/content/search?cql=text~%22%5c%22hello%20dolly%5c%22%22

Term modifiers

Confluence supports modifying query terms to provide a wide range of searching options.

Wildcard searches: ? and * | Fuzzy searches: ~

Wildcard searches: ? and *

Confluence supports single and multiple character wildcard searches.

To perform a single character wildcard search use the "?" symbol.

To perform a multiple character wildcard search use the "*" symbol.

Wildcard characters need to be enclosed in quote-marks, as they are reserved [characters in advanced search](/cloud/confluence/advanced-searching-using-cql). Use quotations, e.g. `summary ~ "cha?k and che*"`.

The single character wildcard search looks for terms that match that with the single character replaced. For example, to search for "text" or "test" you can use the search:

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te?t

Multiple character wildcard searches looks for 0 or more characters. For example, to search for Windows, Win95 or WindowsNT you can use the search:

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win*

You can also use the wildcard searches in the middle of a term. For example, to search for Win95 or Windows95 you can use the search

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wi*95

You cannot use a * or ? symbol as the first character of a search. The feature request for this is JRA-6218.

Fuzzy searches

Confluence supports fuzzy searches. To do a fuzzy search use the tilde, (~), symbol at the end of a single word term. For example to search for a term similar in spelling to "roam" use the fuzzy search:

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roam~

This search will find terms like foam and roams.

Terms found by the fuzzy search will automatically get a boost factor of 0.2.

Advanced Searching using CQL