How to escape Salesforce search query

Question

I'm using the Salesforce ruby gem to do the following

@client.search("FIND {#{@email}}")

@email returns the user's email address. During testing, I had an email address like test+test@example.com and this caused a MALFORMED_SEARCH error. I tried calling to_json on the email, but that didn't fix it. What kind of escaping should I be doing here? Is there a generic way to do this?

I'd like to avoid escaping specific characters like '+', but if that's necessary, I understand. I just don't know what that list of invalid characters is.

I guess a more specific question is: how do I make sure that any query I pass into FIND won't return a MALFORMED_SEARCH error because of invalid characters or something like that?

Thanks!

[EDIT] It seems that the plus sign is the only issue here... Is there any documentation that enumerates other symbols that might be an issue?

Answer 1

The + symbol is reserved in SOQL, this is covered in the documentation along with the other reserved characters:

The following characters are reserved:
? & | ! { } [ ] ( ) ^ ~ * : \ " ' + -

Reserved characters, if specified in a text search, must be escaped (preceded by the backslash \ character) in order to be properly interpreted. An error occurs if you do not precede reserved characters with a backslash. This is true even if the SearchQuery is enclosed in double quotes.