Advanced search techniques

Note: In the following, "character" means both "Roman letter" and "Chinese character".

Advanced search possibilities in text fields:

If you wish to use wild cards within your search strings, choose "begins with" as your search option and use "*" for zero or any number of characters and "@" for a single character. Searching for "ho@@e" will find "horse" and "house"; searching for "f*g" will find "feeling" and "frog".

If you wish to search for a character or a character string within a word, choose the "contains" search option. You can also choose "begins with" and enclose your search term with double quotation marks ("").

If you wish to search for two characters or character strings separated by a space in sequence, choose "begins with" as your search option and enclose the characters or character strings with double quotation marks (""). Search for "the whole of" as a consecutive string by writing this string with the quotation marks. (If you leave out the quotations marks, you will find the larger number of records in which the field in question has these three words (or rather: words beginning with these three strings) in any order.

If you wish to search for any record which has any contents whatsoever in a certain text field (i.e. all records which contain something in the text field in question), choose "begins with" as your search option and use "*" as your search term.

If you wish to search for a word which is exactly as you indicate, prefix it with an equals sign, v writing "=horse" (which will not find "horses").

NB: Since the above search methods may slow down the server, please use them only if they are absolutely necessary.

If you wish to search for any record in which the whole of a text field equals your search term (i.e. contains nothing else but your search term), choose "begins with" as your search option and use "==" as the beginning of your search term.

If you wish to search for all records which do not have any contents in a certain text field, i.e. all records in which the field in question is empty, choose "begins with" as your search option and use "==" as your search term, i.e. do not write anything except the two equals signs.

When marking search terms in the hitlist or detail page, the characters @, *, = and " are stripped from the search string. When these occur in the beginning and end of the search string, search terms will be marked, but if they (* and @) are used inside a search string, usually nothing will be marked (and if anything is marked, it will not be what was searched for).

Jens Østergaard Petersen