I want to search strings like "number 1" or "number 152" or "number 36985".
In all above strings "number " will be constant but digits will change and can have any length.
I tried Search option using wildcard but it doesn't seem to work.
basic regEx operators like + seem to not work.
I tried 'number*[1-9]*' and 'number*[1-9]+' but no luck.
This regular expression only selects upto one digit. e.g. If the string is 'number 12345' it only matches number 12345 (the part which is in bold).
Does anyone know how to do this?
Word doesn't use regular expressions in its search (Find) functionality. It has its own set of wildcard rules. These are very similar to RegEx, but not identical and not as powerful.
Using Word's wildcards, the search text below locates the examples given in the question. (Note that the semicolon separator in 1;100 may be soemthing else, depending on the list separator set in Windows (or on the Mac). My European locale uses a semicolon; the United States would use a comma, for example.
"number [0-9]{1;100}"
The 100 is an arbitrary number I chose for the maximum number of repeats of the search term just before it. Depending on how long you expect a number to be, this can be much smaller...
The logic of the search text is: number is a literal; the valid range of characters following the literal are 0 through 9; there may be one to one hundred of these characters - anything in that range is a match.
The only way RegEx can be used in Word is to extract a string and run the search on the string. But this dissociates the string from the document, meaning Word-specific content (formatting, fields, etc.) will be lost.
Try putting < and > on the ends of your search string to indicate the beginning and ending of the desired strings. This works for me: '<number [1-9]*>'. So does '<number [1-9]#>' which is probably what you want. Note that in Word wildcards the # is used where + is used in other RegEx systems.
Related
As stated in the title, I have two tables I'm attempting to link. Both Strings appear to be a match, however Crystal Reports is not picking it up. The only thing I can think is that that length of the field is different, even though the strings are the same. could that cause a discrepancy? If so how can I correct for it? Thank you
Length of the string will prevent a match. If you are using the Trim(string) function, that only removes spaces found at the beginning or end of your string, so the two strings could still be of different lengths after using this function. You will need to use another function to capture a substring of the original string. To do this you can use the Left(string, length) function to ensure both strings are the same length.
If they still do not match then you may have non-printable characters in one or both of your strings. Carriage Return and Line Feed tend to be the most commonly found non-printable characters. A Carriage Return is represented as Chr(10), while a Line Feed is represented as Chr(13). These are Built In Constants similar to those found in VBA and Visual Basic.
You can use a find and replace to remove them with the following formula. Its not a bad idea to also include the trim and left functions in this as well to ensure you get the best match possible.
Replace(Replace(Left(Trim({YourStringField}), 10),Chr(10), ""),Chr(13), "")
There are a few additional Built In Constants you may need to check for if this doesn't work. A Tab is represented as Chr(9) for example. Its very rare for strings to contain the other Built In Constants though. In most cases Carriage Return and Line Feed are the only ones that are typically found in Plain Text. Tabs and the other constants should only be found in Rich Text and are very rare in string data.
I'm having trouble finding the proper Word wildcard string to find numbers that fit the following patterns:
"NN NN NN" or "NN NN NN.NN" (where N is any number 0-9)
The trouble is the first string is a subset of the second string. My goal is to find a single wildcard string that will capture both. Unfortunately, I need to use an operator that is zero or more occurrences for the ".NN" portion and that doesn't exist.
I'm having to do two searches, and I'm using the following patterns:
[0-9]{2}[^s ][0-9]{2}[^s ][0-9]{2}?[!0-9]
[0-9]{2}[^s ][0-9]{2}[^s ][0-9]{2}.[0-9]{2}
The problem is that first pattern (in bold). It works well unless I have the number in a table or something and there is nothing after it to match (or not match, if you will) the [!0-9].
You could use a single wildcard Find:
[0-9]{2}[^s ][0-9]{2}[^s ][0-9][0-9.]{1,4}
or:
[0-9]{2}[^s ][0-9]{2}[^s ][0-9][0-9.]{1;4}
to capture both. Which you use depends on your regional settings.
I'm coming across a strange situation where I cannot search on string tags that end with a special character. So far I've tried ) and ].
For example, given a Fruit index with a record with a tag apple (red), if you query (using the JS library) with tagFilters: "apple (red)", no results will be returned even if there are records with this tag.
However, if you change the tag to apple (red (not ending with a special character), results will be returned.
Is this a known issue? Is there a way to get around this?
EDIT
I saw this FAQ on special characters. However, it seems as though even if I set () as separator characters to index that only effects the direct attriubtes that are searchable, not the tag. is this correct? can I change the separator characters to index on tags?
You should try using the array syntax for your tags:
tagFilters: ["apple (red)"]
The reason it is currently failing is because of the syntax of tagFilters. When you pass a string, it tries to parse it using a special syntax, documented here, where commas mean "AND" and parentheses delimit an "OR" group.
By the way, tagFilters is now deprecated for a much clearer syntax available with the filters parameter. For your specific example, you'd use it this way:
filters: '_tags:"apple (red)"'
How can I apply multiple search criteria to the document for obtaining a refined result/search? I 'tried' using wildcards -> ?[!a-z][!0-9][!^s] <- to find a character except from range a-z, range 0-9, and the non breaking space(^s). i.e. I do not want to find any character, any number or a space, but tabs, operators, special characters, etc. At least that's what I think it does. How can I use multiple "find what" criteria together in a document?
As a starting point, use wildcards and
[!0-9,a-z,A-Z, ]
should help. It may be possible to refine that further, but if not, VBA or equivalent and either a character-by-character check or multiple find loops are your options.
Background
I have search indexes containing Greek characters. Many people don't know how to type Greek so they enter something called "beta-code". Beta-code can be converted into Greek. For example, beta-code "NO/MOU" would be converted to "νόμου". Characters such as a slash or parenthesis is used to indicate an accent.
Desired Behavior
I want users to be able to search using either beta-code or text in the Greek script. I figured out that the Whoosh Variations class provides the mechanism I need and it almost solves my problem.
Problem
The Variation class works well except for when a slash or a parenthesis are used to indicate an accent in a users' query. The problem is the query are parsed such that the the special characters used to denote the accent result in the words being split up. For example, a search for "NO/MOU" results in the Variations class being asked to find variations of "no" and "mou" instead of "NO/MOU".
Question
Is there a way to influence how the query is parsed such that slashes and parentheses are included in the search words (i.e. that a search for "NO/MOU" results in a search for a token of ""NO/MOU" instead of "no" and "mou")?
The search parser uses a Tokenizer class for breaking up the search string into individual terms. Whoosh will use the class that is associated with the schema. For example, the case below, the SimpleAnalyzer() will be used when searching the "content" field.
Schema( verse_id = NUMERIC(unique=True, stored=True),
content = TEXT(analyzer=SimpleAnalyzer()) )
By default, the SimpleAnalyzer() uses the following regular expression to tokenize search terms: "\w+(.?\w+)*"
To use a different regular expression, assign the first argument to the SimpleAnalyzer to another regular expression. For example, to include beta-code characters (slashes, parentheses, etc.) in tokens, use the following SimpleAnalyzer:
SimpleAnalyzer( rcompile(r"[\w/*()=\+|&']+(\.?[\w/*()=\+|&']+)*") )
Searches will now allow terms to include the special beta-code characters and the Variations class will be able to convert the term to the unicode version.