AquaLogic Interaction User Guide

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Punctuation

Punctuation is treated specially in searches.

The following rules describe the interpretation of punctuation characters.
  • Quotation marks are always interpreted as operators signifying a quoted phrase. It is therefore impossible to search for a quotation mark (there is no escape character, such as a backslash, which would remove the special significance of the quotation marks).
  • All other punctuation loses any special operator significance inside of quotation marks. (The same holds for all operators, such as AND.)
  • Outside of quotation marks, punctuation either has significance as an operator, or it is ignored. The following punctuation has special operator significance outside of quotation marks:
    • Left and right angle brackets(<>) enclose operators, as in <NEAR>
    • Comma (,) is treated as OR
    • Ampersand (&) is treated as AND
    • Vertical bar (|) is treated as OR
    • Plus (+) and minus (-) are interpreted as Internet Style syntax
    • Asterisk (*) is interpreted as a wildcard character
  • Punctuation is always split apart from adjoining alpha-numeric characters. For example, an advanced search for bag-of-words matches documents containing the three tokens bag, of, and words.
  • Underscore is treated as punctuation. This means you must enclose a term containing an underscore in quotes to get an exact match (for example, "HOST_NAME"matches HOST_NAME, but without the quotes, it also matches HOST NAME).

    Symmetrical punctuation tokenization takes place on text stored in the index, so the explosion of a query term such as bag-of-words does not prevent the search from matching a document containing the phrase bag-of-words.

Note:
  • Terms generated by wildcard expansion are not stemmed.
  • Wildcard expansion is performed internally by replacing each pattern with a limited list of terms that match the pattern before actually executing the query. Very broad wildcard expressions might therefore return a partial list of results.

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