[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #65130: Plugin search (term) in wp-admin lacks normalization, causing fragile keyword matching

[WordPress Trac]

#65130: Plugin search (term) in wp-admin lacks normalization, causing fragile
keyword matching
-------------------------+------------------------------
 Reporter:  369work      |       Owner:  (none)
     Type:  enhancement  |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal       |   Milestone:  Awaiting Review
Component:  Plugins      |     Version:
 Severity:  normal       |  Resolution:
 Keywords:               |     Focuses:  administration
-------------------------+------------------------------

Comment (by 369work):

 Thank you for the review.
 You're right — stripping all spaces unconditionally breaks multi-word
 queries that already work (e.g. "wp multibyte patch"). That was a mistake
 in the proposed fix.
 Instead, I'd propose keeping the original $term for the first query, and
 only retrying with spaces/hyphens removed if the result is empty. This
 avoids breaking existing queries while still recovering zero-result cases
 caused by unintentional spacing.

 "wp multibyte patch" → first query succeeds ✅
 "multi byte" → fallback strips spaces → "multibyte" ✅

 That said, partial queries like "wp multi" or "multibyte-pa" can't be
 fixed this way — that would require prefix/partial matching on the
 api.wordpress.org side.
 If this direction seems reasonable, would it be worth pursuing a revised
 patch using the fallback approach?

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/65130#comment:4>
WordPress Trac <https://core.trac.wordpress.org/>
WordPress publishing platform