Using Special Characters and Operators

Text Search: Special Characters and Operators

When conducting a text search you can:

Use 'wildcards' in place of characters. More about 'wildcards'

A wildcard character is a keyboard character such as an asterisk (*) or a question mark (?) that is used to represent one or more characters when you are searching for project items or running a text search query.

Wildcard characters are often used in place of one or more characters when you do not know what the real character is or you do not want to type the entire name.

Wildcards cannot be used as the first character of a search

Wildcard	Description

Asterisk (*)	Use the asterisk as a substitute for zero or more characters. For example: *gt will find get, great** and gt
Question mark (?)	Use the question mark as a substitute for a single character. For example: g?twill find get and gate but not great or grunt

Combine multiple words or phrases using boolean operators

Operator	Description	Syntax	Example

OR	Searches for items containing either (or both) of two terms. When you enter multiple words or phrases without an operator, the OR is implied.	community OR "social interaction" You can also use: community "social interaction"
AND	Searches for items containing both terms.	community AND "social interaction"
NOT (-) Prohibit	Searches for items containing the first term but not the second term. Cannot be used with a single term.	community NOT "social interaction" community-"social interaction"
+ (required)	Searches for items containing the required term and optionally the second term.	+community "social interaction"

Find words with similar or identical spelling using a fuzzy search

Enter a tilde (~) character after a word to find words of similar or identical spelling. This is a useful way of finding spelling mistakes.

For example, searching for roam~ will find words such as 'roams' and 'foam' and 'room'.

Specify proximity using 'near' search characters. Example

Finds words that are within a specified word distance from each other—the tilde (~) specifies proximity.

For example:

“happy busy”~10

Searches for the existence of the words happy and busy within 10 words of each other

Specify relevance weightings for words and phrases

Provides results based on the relevance weighting given to a word or phrase. Weightings must be greater than zero, but can be less than one (e.g. 0.2). Default weighting is one.

For example:

happy^4 busy

In the text search results, finds of the word "happy” will have relevance ranking four times higher than finds of "busy".

Some metacharacters and stop words are reserved for special use in searches and you cannot search for them explicitly. List of metacharacters and stop words

Character	Name	Usage

+	Plus	Indicate words or phrases that must be included
-	Hyphen	Can be used in place of NOT
&	Ampersand	Can be used in place of AND
\|	Pipe	Can be used in place of OR
!	Exclamation mark	Can be used in place of NOT
( )	Round brackets	Groups clauses to form sub queries
{ }	Curly brackets	Signify exclusive range queries
[ ]	Square brackets	Signify inclusive range queries
^	Caret	Symbol with a boost factor (a number) to Indicate level of proximity
" "	Double quotes	Enclose a group of words to enable search for a phrase
~	Tilde	Indicate proximity
*	Asterisk	Multiple character wildcard to include any number of characters
?	Question mark	Single character wild card to include only one character
:	Colon	Indicate a field
\	Backslash	Use before a special character to include it in the search

Stop Words (if your selected 'Text search index' language is English)

"a", "and", "are", "as", "at", "be", "but", "by", "for", "if", "in", "into", "is", "it", "no", "not", "of", "on", "or", "s", "such", "that", "the", "their", "then", "there", "these", "they", "this", "to", "was", "will", "with"