Feature Request: Escape mechanism for special characters in filter values

[Purna Srivatsa]

Hi OpenAlex team,

First off, thank you for building such an incredible resource for the research community.

The Issue

I've encountered an issue when using the display_name filter to look up papers by title. Paper titles containing colons, commas, or pipes break the filter syntax since these characters have special meaning in OpenAlex queries:

• : - filter key/value separator
• , - AND operator between filters
• | - OR operator between values

Example

This query fails with "Invalid query parameter":

/works?filter=display_name:Large language models in radiology: Present challenges, future directions

OpenAlex interprets "Present challenges, future directions" as a separate filter rather than part of the title.

Our Use Case

We batch-fetch papers by title:

/works?filter=display_name:Title One|Title Two|Title Three

Titles with colons are common in academic papers (e.g., "Method X: A Novel Approach to Y"), so this affects a meaningful portion of our queries.

Current Workaround

I'm sanitizing titles by replacing : , | with spaces before querying. This works for most cases but reduces match accuracy.

Feature Request

Would it be possible to add an escape mechanism for special characters in filter values? Some options:

1. Backslash escaping: display_name:Title\: With Colon
2. Quote wrapping: display_name:"Title: With Colon"
3. URL encoding recognition: treating %3A as literal colon in values

Any of these would allow exact title matching regardless of punctuation.

Thanks for considering this! Happy to provide more details if helpful.

Best,

Purna