Searching for word containing periods (E.g., U.F.O.)

Tips on writing regular expressions for searching the post list

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Searching for word containing periods (E.g., U.F.O.)

Postby Spartacus12 » Wed Dec 12, 2012 3:48 am

I looked at the post titles in this regular expressions topic and did not see an answer so I will ask:
Suppose a feller wanted to search for a filename including the characters U.F.O. including the periods.
I tried U[.]F[.]O[.] and also U\.F\.O\. and found nothing. What is the proper syntax?
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Re: Searching for word containing periods (E.g., U.F.O.)

Postby Quade » Wed Dec 12, 2012 10:19 am

How are you searching? Local or internet? The answer changes depending on how.
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Re: Searching for word containing periods (E.g., U.F.O.)

Postby dexter » Wed Dec 12, 2012 12:36 pm

If the Search tab is in "Local" mode, the RE should work

If the Search tab is in "Internet" mode, that uses boolean searches. The problem with your search string is that the "." is removed to create keywords in the indexer. So you'd have to do a direct string match (which takes longer) to find what you are looking for. To do this, enter the string in quotes as "u.f.o." with nothing else in the line. The parser is fairly simple and does not support mixing phrase searches and boolean searches. I just tried it myself and got 392 matches but it took about 30 seconds to process.
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Re: Searching for word containing periods (E.g., U.F.O.)

Postby Spartacus12 » Wed Dec 12, 2012 9:09 pm

dexter wrote:If the Search tab is in "Local" mode, the RE should work

If the Search tab is in "Internet" mode, that uses boolean searches. The problem with your search string is that the "." is removed to create keywords in the indexer. So you'd have to do a direct string match (which takes longer) to find what you are looking for. To do this, enter the string in quotes as "u.f.o." with nothing else in the line. The parser is fairly simple and does not support mixing phrase searches and boolean searches. I just tried it myself and got 392 matches but it took about 30 seconds to process.


This was for an Internet search. Thank you dexter, this solution worked!
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