Search partial words in GitHub Organization's code
git, github, search
Solution
The answer to my question is: No, it is not currently possible.
Source I contacted GitHub with this same question, and their response included this explanation:
Currently, we do not support substring matching in our search. We do break words apart for common variable naming patterns like camel case, so if your variable is named something like myNewVariable, you could search for "my new variable" and this would show up.
However, in your example, the string "-DDISABLE_LIBRARIES_GENERATION=TRUE" wouldn't be broken into substrings like this, so "disable_libraries_generation" would not result in a match.
[...] cloning the repository and using grep or another search functionality locally is likely your best option in this case.
UPDATE (2021-12-14) On December 8, 2021, GitHub announced code search improvements, including "Search for an exact string, with support for substring matches". This is still a technology preview (available here: https://cs.github.com/), but when fully integrated, looks like it might be a satisfactory answer to this question.
UPDATE (2023-05-08) Now that GitHub code search is generally available, a search such as `DISABLE_LIBRARIES_GENERATION org:Kurento` is able to find instances such as `-DDISABLE_LIBRARIES_GENERATION=TRUE`.
Thus, I'm happy to say that 6 years after the question was posted, we can give it the closure it deserved with a glorious yes, at last it works :-)
Problem
Is there a way to grep for partial words inside all code belonging to a GitHub Organization, using the web UI? Of course, the intent is to avoid having to clone all the organization's repositories and do a local grep; that would be a cumbersome, tedious and error-prone task. I'm aware of Search code inside a Github project, but I find the search is very misleading as it doesn't really find all results. For example, I want to find all uses of the string `DISABLE_LIBRARIES_GENERATION` in all files from the Kurento organization. Using any of these Advanced Search terms ``` DISABLE_LIBRARIES_GENERATION user:Kurento DISABLE_LIBRARIES_GENERATION org:Kurento ``` yields these results: - Finds `${DISABLE_LIBRARIES_GENERATION}` in `kms-core/src/server/CMakeLists.txt`. - Finds `set (DISABLE_LIBRARIES_GENERATION FALSE` in `kms-core/CMake/CodeGenerator.cmake`. - Finds the string in `kms-core/debian/changelog`. - Doesn't find `-DDISABLE_LIBRARIES_GENERATION=TRUE` as used in `adm-scripts/kurento_get_version.sh`, `adm-scripts/kurento_generate_js_module.sh` and `adm-scripts/kurento_generate_java_module.sh`.