Is it possible to return a list of all artists with a ';' or '/' character in their name

MusicBrainz
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1

I would like to export a list of all artists with a common separator in their name.
api search would be ideal but ui search would be fine.
thank you

2

I did try that:

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Weird search result there. Where is AC/DC ?

Notice how the search is actually looking for " / ". Space Slash Space. It is padding with spaces, but not looking for it inside the name of the artist.

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From the search page, with “advanced syntax”, using the search string (+* +/ + *), I got 5,555 hits. Some have the / in an alias rather than in the primary name.

I don’t know if that’s comprehensive, but it’s something.

The query breaks down as follows:
+: required
*: multiple-character wildcard

You may need to escape some separators (e.g. :).

See Lucene query syntax.

4 Likes
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@CallerNo6 I also got those same 5,555 hits by just dumping a / in the search box.

image

Actually, it gets quite weird if you look at the results. In the first six pages it is just space slash space matches, but it did find the band +/- which I thought was a comical test of a wildcard search.

Then Peter Gabriel appears on page 6 for no obvious reason. Page 10 there are lots of Latvian matches… Then the further on it gets the more vague it is. The legitimate matches of Pan/Tone and Born/Dead appear on Page 15… but by page 20 the matches are all in the disambiguation text.

And that still doesn’t come up with AC/DC. (I got bored reading after page 30…)

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Something is clearly a bit weird here…

Search for AC/DC and you find at least six of them.

Search for ?C/DC and you still find them.

Search for ??/?? and none of them are in the results.

Maybe we need to escape the slash to find it - a search for artist:*/ is another combination of results, but still no AC/DC.

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using peoples ideas i got
artist:*\/*

contains ac/3p but no ac/dc

which is odd

searching the artist field ensures only names are searched it seems

2 Likes
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Yeah - I tried that one too… but still failed to get AC/DC.

Searching for ?C/DC gives six bands which should all be appearing in the result you are really after.

There is clearly extra processing going into the search string that we are not aware of.