I think it’s just that I’m relatively familiar with regex or a matching system like Hazel’s, and so my brain thinks along those lines when I’m trying to figure out how to pick out certain data uniquely from document contents. The Scan Text matching system is different in some ways that at times I need to shift to a different mindset to work out how to do it in Scan Text without a regex.
For instance, as in the example I gave for the text contents of a statement I’m looking at: “Opening/Closing Date 10/14/24 - 11/13/24”, my first thought process is something along the lines of “look for the string ‘Opening/Closing Date’, followed by a date, followed by the string ’ - ', then grab the date after that”. But because Scan Text only allows one wildcard (aside from the regular expression option), I can’t grab just that second date while using “Opening/Closing Date” as part of the prefix. So I have to start with the less precise " - " as the prefix and follow it with a line return and maybe some text from the beginning of the next line, if it’s consistent, as my suffix and hope that is unique enough to capture what I want.
At least, this is how it works as far as I’ve been able to tell.