New article
Recently updated
How to Use Advanced Search Features
Who is this article for?Review Authorsreviewing documents.
Please Review Administrators can define user types for document reviewing.
Advanced search features that enable reviewers to perform more refined and targeted pattern matches within the document content and comments. The following article discusses how to use advanced search features when reviewing documents in Please Review.
Advanced Search Feature
Selecting the ‘Advanced Search’ checkbox performs an advanced search. The advanced search capability is not a word search but a ‘pattern match’ search for letters, digits, spaces, and some punctuation. The output also includes punctuation.
When 'Advanced search' is selected a full regular expression may be used in the search box to return results. Regular expressions allow for extremely complex searching including full Boolean searches and subtle searches where, for example, you want to match alternate spellings such as returning all instances of grey and grey or colour and colour.
- Regular expressions use twelve standard punctuation characters (known as metacharacters) to determine advanced searches.
| Meta Characters |
\ ^ $ . | ? * + ( ) [ and { |
|---|---|
|
| |
Equivalent of the Boolean 'OR'. |
|
. |
Used as a wildcard. Matches any single character except newline. |
|
\ |
For escaping special characters. |
|
^ |
Matches the beginning of the string. |
|
$ |
Matches the end of the string. |
|
? |
One allowed, but optional. |
|
* |
0 or more quantifier. |
|
+ |
1 or more quantifier, also a 'possessive quantifier'. |
|
( ) |
Start and end of a sub pattern. |
|
[ ] |
Start and end of a class. |
|
{ } |
Start and end of a qualifier. |
Note: If you have advanced search checked and you search for ‘word.’, unless escaped, you are searching for the equivalent of ‘word*’ in a simple search.
With advanced search selected, if you want to search for ‘word.’, you need to search for ‘word\.’ – the ‘\’ tells the search to ignore the period as a metacharacter.
Here are a few things to note about advanced search:
- A search for the word ‘fred’ will include in the results ‘fred’, ‘freds’, 'befred' and any word which includes the string (i.e. pattern) of ‘fred’.
- The exact pattern is matched. For example, a search for ‘fred blogs’ will not find ‘fred blogs’ - the double space in the latter excludes it from the results.
- The search will be case sensitive if the ‘case sensitive’ option is selected.
- The ‘accent sensitive’ option is not available with advanced searches.
- For detailed use of regular expressions see www.regular-expressions.info.