CenterForOpenScience/osf.io — pull request #1280 by huangginny (2014-11-21 18:39:38+00:00)
Title: [feature] Escape special characters when searching for contributors

From CenterForOpenScience/osf#1250 hopefully I've done the right thing!

**Purpose**
If you put quotes when searching for contributors, it returns A LOT OF results (that is, including those results that are not related to the search query)

**Cause**
Special characters are not html escaped properly, causing confusions whether they are parts of the search query or belong to lucene search syntax

**Changes**
Uses re.escape(item) to escape every special character in the query, except whitespaces. item do not contain whitespaces, since it is any element in the list "items" that is returned by splitting the query by whitespaces.