How to search for punctuation

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ironick
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How to search for punctuation

Post by ironick »

I'm using version 9.4, build 364.0.

Is it possible to search for punctuation marks? I have a pdf of a book and the author uses ["as"] (that is, the word 'as' surrounded by double-quote marks) in a technical sense throughout the book. Is there a way to only match such instances, not every occurrence of the word 'as'? I tried backslashes in front of each mark, eg [\"as\"], but that didn't work. I searched the online help for [punctuation] but didn't see anything relevant.
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: How to search for punctuation

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello, ironick

If you use the "advanced" search criteria, and choose "this exact phrase" you can then include punctuation as part of your search action. Due to the dynamic nature of the other fields, they understand punctuation as wild cards or parts of regular expressions, and so searching for them is not usually successful.
image.png
image.png (22.9 KiB) Viewed 308 times
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ironick
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Re: How to search for punctuation

Post by ironick »

Hi Daniel,

I tried your method, but it didn't work. See the attached image:
Screenshot 2023-03-22 181138.jpg
I entered ["as"] in the 'this exact phrase' search box, but it still matched all instances of 'as', not just quoted instances.

Any other suggestions?

-- Nick
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: How to search for punctuation

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello, ironick

It appears that you are running an old build, there should be 4 fields for you you to search with. Please check for updates and ensure that you are on version 9.5, build 367.0.
Below is a short story that I created using as many words that contain "as" as I could think of. You can see here that searching in the correct field, in the latest build, does give the expected results (It took too much effort to avoid using "as" in that second sentence):
PDFXEdit_mVDWaG7ABo.gif
Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

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ironick
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Joined: Mon Oct 28, 2019 9:40 pm

Re: How to search for punctuation

Post by ironick »

Hi Daniel,

Upgrading to the latest version did the trick. Thanks!

One small tip for others: you may have to copy the punctuation mark you want to search for from the text you are searching. I typed in ["as] and the search still found nothing. But when I copied what looked like ["as] from the text, it worked. Clearly, the quotation mark in the text had a different Unicode code than what I typed with my keyboard.
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TrackerSupp-Daniel
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Re: How to search for punctuation

Post by TrackerSupp-Daniel »

Hello, ironick

Glad to hear it, and I hope that tip helps some others!

Kind regards,
Dan McIntyre - Support Technician
Tracker Software Products (Canada) LTD

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Our Web site domain and email address has changed as of 26/10/2023.
https://www.pdf-xchange.com
Support@pdf-xchange.com
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