Non-Latin Character Searches Timing Out

Hi there. I’ve found a problem on our site recently that, while I wouldn’t have guessed was in any way related to the Tablepress plugin, is only resolved by my deactivating the Tablepress plugin. I’ve done extensive testing including deactivating all the other plugins on my staging site and switching back to the TwentyTwenty theme and only with Tablepress activated does the issue described below occur.

The issue we’re encountering is with search queries, specifically queries comprising not-Latin characters. Ours is an Arabic site and so searches are generally in Arabic but I have tested with searches for English terms and they work as expected. Searches for Arabic strings hang and eventually time out. The issue was highlighted when Google Search Console report a load of cached URLs no longer working.

I’ve not dug into your code (and I’m not very hot on SQL) but is there perhaps something in there that alters the way that SQL queries are carried out, that in some way sets the default/allowed characters or something like that?

For now, all we can do is deactivate the plugin so I’ll hope to hear back from you. I can privately share access to the issue in place on our staging environment if you would like to see it in action.

Many thanks