HP IAP Version 2.1 User Guide, March 2011

7 Query expression syntax and matching
This section describes the IAP Web Interface syntax used to search for archived documents (files or
email messages), and explains how queries are matched against documents.
Major topics include:
• Query expressions, page 51
• Word characters, page 51
• Letters and digits in different character sets, page 52
• Matching words, page 54
• Matching similar words, page 54
• Matching word sequences, page 55
• Boolean query expressions, page 58
• Query expression examples, page 61
Query expressions
Query expressions can be as simple or as complex as needed. The essential idea behind document
retrieval is that query words are compared with document words to find a match. You can also:
• Look for document words that are textually similar, but not necessarily identical, to query words.
See “Matching similar words” on page 54.
• Look for word sequences in a document: words that are near each other, and in a particular order.
See “Matching word sequences” on page 55.
• Combine query words using logical (Boolean) operators (AND, OR, NOT). See “Boolean query
expressions” on page 58.
Together, these query constructs provide considerable power to find what you need, provided you
learn to use them well.
The way query expressions are interpreted is similar to the way documents are indexed when archived.
Text is parsed (broken down) into words. Remaining characters are considered separators and ignored.
Query expressions are fundamentally composed of words, no matter how complex the expression.
For indexing and searching, a word need not belong to a natural language, such as English. For
example, wt6_ht3 is a valid document word or query word. Query words can contain wildcards,
such as in f??t.
Word characters
When the system examines a query expression to determine its words, some characters are not
included in query words, but are treated as word separators. When a document is archived, indexing
determines which document words are available for searching in the same way.
Learning the rules of creating query words means also learning the rules of document indexing and,
therefore, what words you can search for.
HP IAP 2.1 User Guide 51