Filtering on Special Characters

When building a filter expression that is filtering text, there are four special characters that must be "escaped" in the filter expression. To “escape” a character means to precede that character with another character in the filter expression so that the system knows that you are filtering on the literal character, rather than intending that the character take on its special meaning.

the following four special characters, the special character must be “escaped” in the filter expression:
  • * (asterisk)
  • ? (question mark)
  • ‘ (single quote)
  • \ (back slash)

For example, if you just included an asterisk or question mark, it would take on its special meaning as a wild card character. See Using Wild Card Characters.

The character that you precede the special character with depends on what you are filtering (work items, process instances, or events), as shown in the table below (although it is most often a back slash).
Character to match literally Events
* \*
? \?
' \'
\ \

Note that for the back slash character when filtering work items or process instances, a single back slash is shown in the table, which means no escape character is needed in those situations.

As an example, if you are filtering for events for a resource (Principal name) by the name “Jon O’Reilly”, you would need to escape the single quote in the name with a back slash character.