How to search on GitHub to get exact string matches, including special characters

I can search exact matches from Google by using quotes like "system <<-".

How can I do the same thing for GitHub?

Update

You can't. The official GitHub searching rules:

Due to the complexity of searching code, there are a few restrictions on how searches are performed:

• Only the default branch is considered. In most cases, this will be the master branch.
• Only files smaller than 384 KB are searchable.
• Only repositories with fewer than 500,000 files are searchable.
• You must always include at least one search term when searching source code. For example, searching for language:go is not valid, while amazing language:go is.
• At most, search results can show two fragments from the same file, but there may be more results within the file.
• You can't use the following wildcard characters as part of your search query:
  . , : ; / \ ` ' " = * ! ? # $ & + ^ | ~ < > ( ) { } [ ]
  The search will simply ignore these symbols.

Clone and use git-grep:

git support searching in sources with git-grep command. Just clone a repository and use the command in the folder:

git grep "text-to-search"

Alternatives:

I recommend you to try ripgrep tool, it's fast and simple. Works like git-grep but looks nicer:

rg "text-to-search"

And you can use the standard grep to search any text in files:

grep -r "text-to-search" /repository

You can use Google directly.

How about this?

"your_string_to_search" site::https://github.com
"your_string_to_search" site::https://gist.github.com

Today I was trying to look for an exact match of filter class in files named logback.xml in any repo on Github. And I came up with the following query which did the job.

"filter class" in:file filename:logback.xml

To enable exact matches with quotes you need to follow your search with the "in:file" modifier. The matches are not quite exact, the word "class" will have to follow the word "filter", but it seems there can be 0 or more spaces or symbols characters between the two words.

Adding to @mrgloom's answer, if you're looking for code in a specific programming language in Github using Google you could do something like this in Google's search bar:

• state the specific string you're looking for using the "intext:" search operator
• add the programming language you're interested in, using the "ext:" operator (i.e. "ext:py", "ext:R", "ext:rb", etc.)
• search in all public repos in Github using the "site:" operator mrgloom mentioned.

Example:

intext:"%% 2 == 0" ext:R site:github.com