Search partial words in GitHub Organization's code

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.