Describe the feature

I'd love it if search work as described in the title.

I've never searched for a three digit number, especially, except for searching for gear by ilvl.

So for example, these queries:

"<200" should be read as "level<200"
"486" should be read as "level=486"
"486 or 489" read as "level=486 or level=489"
">400 and <500" should be read as "level>400 and level<500"

If you really wanted, you could interpret the equals with an or, such as
"200" read as "level=200 or 200"
For the > and < operations, no one is ever searching for the text "<200" in the name of the item. They are searching for ilvl.

Cheers.

Describe the implementation

A bit of code parsing the search bar, that if it is a number with < or > in front of it, and nothing else, it means "level>number"

If it's just a number, it means "level=number or number"

I'm on the fence about this one. Let me think about it and I'll get back to you!

They are searching for ilvl.

Probably, but I don't think it can be an exclusive search. There are a good number of items with numbers in the name. Copilot found a few - there are other 3 digit fish as well.

https://www.wowhead.com/item=74853/100-year-soy-sauce
https://www.wowhead.com/item=160317/v-300-serial-plate
https://www.wowhead.com/item=13917/103-pound-mightfish#

plus a ton of Darkmoon cards and other items with smaller numbers

As an alternate, interpreting

=300 as level=300.

Or even having "l" as an alias for "level", such as
l=300 as level=300
l>450 and l<500 as level>450 and level<500

Hehe, no, I mean you could edit like, 1 line in a lua file to add it, but it's not an option yet. Will work on it!

How about the ability to define your own aliases?

That would work too.

Are you about to tell me that's already a feature? 😊

Fair enough. Thanks for the consideration.

I think most use cases would benefit from the original suggestion, but if you don't like that or adding ability for aliases is a lot less work, I am all for it!

offtopic: I have tried editing lua files before for small items like this, but then when I update the addons, my edits are gone, and I don't know how to elegantly keep track of this or keep things updated with small edits over a number of addons.

I don't have the programming/lua experience to code a alias-namer. Is (https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Create_a_WoW_AddOn_in_15_Minutes) the most relevant starting-off point? I don't imagine you'd want a pull request hard-coding 'l' as an alias for 'level.'