Hi John. I'm not quite sure what you mean by the way your question is worded, but you're correct in that if there are parentheses or spaces in a list name, that name will need to be in full quotes. And using parentheses to group search criteria will not use quotes (unless, again, there is more spaces, etc in the location name, tag name, and so on). Does that make sense?

list:"List Name (with parentheses)" AND (tag:1 OR tag:2) ...

If I'm misunderstanding your question, please let me know.

Hi, Thanks for your reply. The situation is that I have a list of films that I'd like to watch sometime. If they've been released, the task will have the year of release after its title in parenthesis - e.g. "Some Film (2022)". If it's yet to be released, there will be nothing after the title - e.g. "Another Film".

I'm trying to create a smart list that just shows me films that have not been released, so I'm trying this in the query editor:

not name:"(" and list:"Films Wishlist"

However, when I save this, I end up with:

not name:name and list:"Films Wishlist"

I can always use another marker for unreleased films, of course, like "Another Film (9999)", but just curious about whether it's possible to get it to work the way that I was trying, and whether I'd possibly stumbled across a bug?

How about this:
list:"Films Wishlist" NOT "("

Does that work?

Hi john.cobb,
Before you replied I started looking into this and I noticed this issue. It seems like search operators don't work with parentheses the way you are describing.

If it helps at all, that's only with a single character so even adding a space would work: name:" ("

(Of course that would only show if it matches both characters, which may not apply in all cases!)

I've added this to our list to investigate. Sorry for the inconvenience there.

Of course, I also understand that may not be the issue you're encountering! Please let me know if not. And we'll fix this issue either way. 😅

Hi andrewski,

Using not name:" (" worked perfectly. Thanks so much!