Appendix A: Search Rules & Conventions

  • Investigate/know your data set, look at the vocabulary in ZyFIND and keep that data set in mind when designing queries.
  • Formulate your expectations and test your queries.
  • Operators are placed only between search terms, except NOT.
  • NOT can be placed at the beginning of a search statement, but never at the end.
  • Two operators cannot appear in sequence, except NOT (AND NOT, OR NOT).
  • Operators are reserved words, therefore, you cannot use them as content words. For example, the search statement and OR or will not be accepted.
  • Avoid using long AND/NOT chains. Instead, use "1 of {worda, wordb, wordc}".
  • Capital and lowercase letters are considered identical. We show operators in capitals for emphasis and clarity.
  • An operator can appear more than once in a search statement.
  • Use ? over *.
  • Use [a-z] over ?.
  • Avoid using a search query like "*c*". This will search through the whole library.
  • Use positional queries over proximity queries. Positional queries are more precise.
  • The W/n operator must include an integer in the range 1 to 16382, followed by a space and a content word.
  • You can use one term to retrieve both the hyphenated and non-hyphenated spellings of a term; for example, the search term:

    - database retrieves database and data-base, but not data base

    - data-base retrieves data-base, but not database and data base

    - data base retrieves data-base and data base, but not database.

  • Searches with duplicate words in series also find single occurrences of that word; for example, the search statement, sing sing , would find single occurrences of sing as well as the phrase, sing sing.
  • Words that are normally hyphenated are recognized, for example, Winston-Salem.
  • All printable characters in the ASCII character set are recognized.
  • A sentence-ending period and other trailing punctuation marks are ignored, when a space or a carriage return follows. Periods are recognized when followed by a character, as in I.B.M. or in 292.004. Apostrophes are treated as null characters, and are therefore ignored.
  • It is not possible to search for capitalized letters, since all terms in the dictionary are stored in lower case.
  • When searching CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese or Korean), put a space between each character.