The ability to search for @, #, $, etc.

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comvox
Posts: 24
Joined: Mon Jun 10, 2019 3:29 am

The ability to search for @, #, $, etc.

Post by comvox »

It would be useful if there was the ability to search for some of the characters that both global search, and search for text inside a note, now take as punctuation characters.

This would allow an easy use of keywords. For example, one might use any word preceded by # as a keyword, such as #car. (It is possible to do this with letters instead. For example, one could have precede a keyword with a special letter combination, such as "ll", so the keyword is llcar. But this is ugly.) One way such keywords differ from tags in that they would allow marking of particular sectiona in a note.

One problem with this suggestion, however, is that there are ways in which having @, # etc as punctuation characters is useful. So if they are eliminated as punctuation characters, this would probably mess up the way some MI users work at present. Therefore, it would be necessary to allow @, #, etc. to serve both as a punctuation character in a search, and as a regular letter. Perhaps one could have that search takes a punctuation character as a regular letter only if it is preceded by a special character, say, `. So a search for `#car would take # as an ordinary character, and would only find notes with "#car", while a search for #car would -- as at present -- find all notes with car, or #car, or @car, etc.

One elegant use of this would be as follows. If one could use @ (or # or whatever) as a letter in a search, rather than a punctuation character, this would allow easy searches for notes that link to a particular note. In MI 7, starting to type @ has the same significance as typing [[ in MI 6, and this makes it easy to set links to a note. So it is easy to set a hyperlink to, say, the note titled "car". At present, such a hyperlink shows in the note as the underlined word "car", although one can change what text is displayed. Suppose one ensures that the text to display is @car. Then to find all the notes that link to the note "car", all one would have to do is a global search for `@car (if one uses `@ to indicate that @ should be taken as a letter).
Telesto
Posts: 3377
Joined: Fri Dec 15, 2017 5:32 pm

Post by Telesto »

This sounds like a practical approach to what is requested here: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=5814&p=11420&hilit=analysis#p11420

A bit like adding HTML meta tags specific selection of text (except that the meta tag must be visible for the user)
comvox
Posts: 24
Joined: Mon Jun 10, 2019 3:29 am

Post by comvox »

Already Version 7.06 (Ver 6418) had fixes for search for various characters. That is fast!
But the fix worked for Find Text and for searches in perspectives, but not in global search.

The list of changes states:

Fixed: Find Text and Replace Text for search texts containing some characters (<>&\)
Fixed: Global Search for search texts containing some characters (+<=>|~)


In the cases I checked:
Find Text is fixed as stated.
There is also good behavior in searches in a perspective (such as that Comment contains =car).
But it is not fixed in Global Search
It is still the case that if one searches for, say, =car in global search,
it finds all examples of car, not just =car.
comvox
Posts: 24
Joined: Mon Jun 10, 2019 3:29 am

Post by comvox »

This is still not fixed in version 6444.

It's particularly a problem as perspectives, for which it is fixed, can't search in text.
What I would like is that it is fixed for global search and filters,
and also that perspectives could search in text.
jcpelletier
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Aug 06, 2020 4:12 pm

Post by jcpelletier »

Hello,

I would also appreciate the feature to search for special characters within Global Search (so as to create custom text tags within note text)

Thanks
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