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Table Of Contents
Word Delimiters
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Word Delimiters
When words are separated by white space and/or special characters, the white space, whether
tabs or spaces, is equivalent to a single separator and is called a "word delimiter." Word
delimiters are never indexed as part of a word and should not be used in search expressions.
In the name, "O’Connor," for example, the apostrophe is a word delimiter and is not indexed. It
is the two words "O" and "Connor," which are indexed. To search for this word, you would do a
phrase search for "o connor". Double quotes are part of the search expression and indicate a
phrase: in this case, two adjacent words in the story, "o" and "connor".
The set of characters used to isolate words when indexing includes the spacebar character and
the following 32 characters:
‘ ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) " ’ | \ + = - _ ; : / ? < > , . [ ] { }
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If you use any word delimiters in a search string it will yield unpredictable results. An error may
appear that states, "Find can’t do searches with NOT," or "Operator can’t follow operator in
search."
Special characters, when used, must be preceded by a backslash \ or removed.
Basic Proximity Searches
If you use the last word in a paragraph and the first word in the following paragraph in a
proximity query, you must use a spanning value of at least 5 to find the story (1 for the first word,
2 for the end of the paragraph, and 2 for the start of the paragraph). A spanning value of less than
5 will always fail.
Brackets
To search for stories containing a set of words near each other in any order, enclose the word set
in square brackets ( [...] ).
The query: [taxes deductions] will find stories containing taxes after all the deductions and
deductions figured from state taxes.
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The maximum number of words allowed from the start of the first expression in the range to the
start of the last expression in the range is 10. The default will allow 9 words between the first and
last words in the brackets.