# Ignored in Smart Group Search

Consider the Smart Group below. The contents of the group are the same regardless of whether I search for “#Air Facts” or “Air Facts”.

Is # a special character that is ignored in matching content?

I too was trying to do this some weeks ago and in the end concluded that this old thread was still relevant (i.e., you can’t search for non-alphanumeric characters).

Edit: I couldn’t find anything specific about this in the user guide and (assuming I’ve not missed anything) I’d find it helpful for it to be mentioned there.

Stephen

1 Like

Thanks

There do seem to be some restrictions on what can be searched for. But I am not quite sure which characters can or cannot be searched.

The legendary Bill DeVille commented in the thread you quoted that:

DEVONthink searches look only at alphanumeric characters, and ignore punctuation marks and other non-alphanumeric characters such as $, #, %, &, etc.

However I edited a few of my files and changed the search to “$Air Facts” and it does work then.

So the dollar sign is included among the characters that can be searched for, in addition to letters and numbers? Which other characters can or cannot be searched for?

In addition to alphanumeric characters only some currencies ($, € …) and paragraphs (§) can be used to improve searching for amounts or legal stuff.

1 Like