Help: Search for `-` (hyphen) in document names

DEVONthink
1

Hello, I need a little help.

I need to search for all the documents in my DT database that contain a hyphen character -, but DT returns no results for the search query name:-. I looked up in the documentation for the reason and according to the Appendix > Search Operators section,

Words separated by hyphens are handled like word1word2 OR "word1 word2".

So how can I search for the hyphen character? Is there an escape character that forces DT to take my search query literally, e.g. name:\-?

1 Like
2

The indexed-based search which supports operators & wildcards is limited to alpha-numeric characters. But you could e.g. use Name contains - instead (name:~-)

2 Likes
3

Woah I know DEVONthink has a crazy powerful search engine but it’s crazier than I thought! I need to work through the Search Operators section in the docs.

Thank you for your kind help!

4

The easiest way to get used to it is to enable the advanced search, IMHO. Updating the advanced search or the toolbar search will automatically update the other so that it’s not necessary to check the help all the time for the syntax.

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5

Oh right! I read about this functionality in the book Take Control of DEVONthink 3 but completely forgot about its existence :man_facepalming: Thanks for the precious tip!

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Chris @cgrunenberg, another similar question: let us say I want to find files that contain an explicit link to a page, so I search for content:[[My page]] or content:"[[My page]]".

Should this work? (Doesn’t seem to, over here)

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7

Text contents support only index-based searching due to the amount of data.

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So only alphanumeric characters, right?

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Alpha-numeric characters and few additional ones (e.g. $, € and §)

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Good to know! Thanks, Chris :slight_smile: