There are a few approaches to tackle this issue. One would be to enable the Use comma as the only tag separator setting in admin/posting. This way you would be able to input anything but commas, slashes or backslashes (might depend on your web server but Apache has issues with the slashes on Linux).
The other alternative, is the one Gideon suggests in his answer here. The thing with this approach is that it will impact many other parts of the core that require splitting words and you might not want that to happen.
The last alternative would be just to customize the function that processes the tags itself. That way you'll know you'd only be changing how tags are processed without impacting the rest of the core. In order to do so, follow these steps:
1. Edit the qa-include/app/format.php file
2. Locate the qa_get_tags_field_value function in this line
3. Edit it so that it looks this way:
function qa_get_tags_field_value($fieldname) {
require_once QA_INCLUDE_DIR . 'util/string.php';
$text = qa_post_text($fieldname);
if (qa_opt('tag_separator_comma'))
return array_unique(preg_split('/\s*,\s*/', trim(qa_strtolower(strtr($text, '/', ' '))), -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY));
else {
$delimiters = ' "\',[]'; // Add any tag separator
return array_unique(preg_split('/([\n\r\t\/\\\\' . preg_quote($delimiters, '/') . ']+)/', qa_strtolower($text), -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY));
}
}
4. Edit the $delimiter variable and add any character there that you want to consider a word breaker. They will not be part of the tags and will make the words to split into 2 tags, when found. Add anything you want but make sure, if you add an apostrophe, to escape it this way \'. Note that apart from the characters added in there, the slash and backslash characters are delimiters that you shouldn't remove from the following line, in order to avoid routing issues.
Example after following the previous steps:
Input tag string: c++ /home/user:/etc/paswd C:\Windows (T@G!) file*.zip "hello" one[again]two.tags
Generated tags:
- c++
- home
- user:
- etc
- paswd
- c:
- windows
- (t@g!)
- file*.zip
- hello
- one
- again
- two.tags
