Searching for bands whose names are punctuation

MusicBrainz
, ,
1

A while ago, I created an artist entry for a band whose name was () [two characters, open-paren and close-paren – maybe there was a space between them] And I was able to use the search function [in a separate window] to see that there was already a band in musicbrainz with that name, so I knew I would have to use a disambiguation comment.

Now I see that I can no longer search for () with the search system. Or is there some special trick to it?

This would not be so bad if there was some other search engine out there that I could use for this.

2

You need to use the advanced query syntax
The \ is the escape character

So \( \)

Note: you need the space in the middle. The artist is ( ) in musicbrainz with a space

3

2 posts were split to a new topic: Typing special characters in Discourse

5

You can also set an artist alias with a common word by which fans are referring to their band, if any.
You would then be able to search this word and it would find that artist.

4 Likes
6

A direct search seems to work, at least: Search Results - MusicBrainz

7

Aha I see now

Initially I searched for (as the author suggested)
()
without a space. That returns nothing. Zero results.
I was expecting it to. So I then looked at the advanced query syntax and posted above as in some of the documentation it said that ( and ) and a load of others were reserved characters and needed escaping. It seems they are not reversed cahracters.

Searching for just
(
(again no space) returns loads of relevant result in normal search.

Searching for
( )
(with a space)
returns.
Even with the normal searches.

It seems odd that () normal searches and \(\) for advanced returns nothing at all.

And actually that is what the problem the OP encountered. There must be something special with searching for ().