The bug can be reproduced by the following way:

from django.utils.text import smart_split
from django.utils.text import unescape_string_literal

search_term = 'Foo "Bar "Baz"'
parts = list(smart_split(search_term))
unescape_string_literal(parts[1])

Result is ValueError: Not a string literal: '"Bar "Baz'

If somebody has such the problem, here is our temporary fix which was added to our internal basic ModelAdmin:

from django.utils import text


class ModelAdmin(...):

    ...

    def get_search_results(self, request, queryset, search_term):
        parts = search_term.split()
        try:
            for part in text.smart_split(search_term):
                text.unescape_string_literal(part)
        except ValueError:
            parts = map(lambda t: t.strip('"').strip("'"), parts)
        return super().get_search_results(request, queryset, ' '.join(parts))

Thanks for the report.

Regression in 26a413507abb38f7eee4cf62f2ee9727fdc7bf8d.
Reproduced at 9760e262f85ae57df39abe2799eff48a82b14474.

​PR

In 23fa29f6:

In 59cce823: