Searching special characters

[Mata Hari 14]

I searched for # or other like this

Not possible ?

[jefito 5,586]

Not in general in an Evernote search query, no. See the Evernote search Grammar page: https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/search_grammar.php, particularly the secion on "Matching Literal Terms". The money quote:

Quote

Punctuation is used to split the input query and document into words, but it is ignored for text matching. The behavior of a quoted search should behave as if the following operations were performed on both the search query and the target note:

 

[Mata Hari 14]

Too bad. Why is this not possible in EN?

[DTLow 5,680]

1 hour ago, Mata Hari said:

Too bad. Why is this not possible in EN?

It's a not uncommon design feature to improve search indexing efficiency   
- dropping special characters   
- dropping stop words (and, the, ...)   
- only beginnings of words

[jefito 5,586]

2 hours ago, Mata Hari said:

Too bad. Why is this not possible in EN?

Um, because that's how they designed it? That was an Evernote technical document that I posted, after all....

[4Everbuggy 0]

Well, it's poorly designed then. This way it can only be called a glorified word search.

Most mature search languages offer an escape syntax to circumvent this issue. Not Evernote, of course.

[BuzzKill 9]

Have to side with 4Everbuggy.  The ability to search for literal strings, even those with non-character elements, has been around for years (eg grep escape characters and pattern matching).  I understand design decisions, but this seems like a miss.  I'm not going to bother to harp on when if ever this will get added.  I was forced to live over a year in limbo waiting for a nasty bug in Android to get fixed that caused youtube to play spontaneously at random times after clipping a video earlier in the day.

[PinkElephant 5,157]

Don’t know what playing YT has to do with search ?!

The search language is tuned to find a selected number of notes, from which to pick the searched one. It serves the purpose which is to retrieve notes from an account.

No need to fix what ain’t broken.

[Gone South 1]

Consider: special characters are VITAL to differentiate tags into sorted hierarchies. Suppose I have ":3" to specify an Action, "^3" to specify a Status and "3" for a text tag. I want Evernote to show the tags in that order. And in Notes display they do. (Took a while to figure out the sort order by trial and error. C'mon, Evernote! Give us a support article on character sort orders. Yeah... plural. They're not the same in the individual tag display.)

But if I then want to search by Action (:3), I get ALL the Status results (^3) and text results (3) as well because search ignores special characters. Thanks for giving me WAY more than I need, Evernote. Now I must plod through the results for ":3"

This is a big fail. After all, no matter how many users plead for nested Notebooks, we are limited to Stacks with Notebooks in them. That leaves tags to do the heavy lifting. We can create a sort hierarchy, but then we can't use that SAME sort hierarchy in search. Huh?

So sad! I'm using Legacy because v10 still sucks at the serious data management and maintenance functions. It's like v10 was created for light users who never paid for Evernote in the first place. And not the power users (including corporates) who would pay for a power app. I'm grandfathered on Plus and won't consider an upgrade until Evernote at least shows some commitment to power users. Dear Ian Small: please fix. 

[Mike P 1,693]

23 minutes ago, Gone South said:

But if I then want to search by Action (:3), I get ALL the Status results (^3) and text results (3) as well because search ignores special characters. Thanks for giving me WAY more than I need, Evernote. Now I must plod through the results for ":3"

How are you doing the search? Search ignores punctuation in a general search for words but not in tags. I created your three tags and assigned one each to three notes. I had no difficulty finding just one tag using for example.

tag::3

Also when I typed in :3 into the search box the tag came up in the list of suggested search results 

And of course you can use the filter which obviously differentiates between the different tags:

 

I imagine something similar will also work in legacy. 

[PinkElephant 5,157]

@Gone South … Legacy is end of life, EN won‘t change a bit of the code anymore. If there is a difference between legacy and v10 (didn’t try), it is upgrade time when this is important for you.

You can still run legacy, side by side with v10.

[Gone South 1]

Thanks, Mike P. 

Got this to work, albeit with a few "false positives" (^3 showed where :3 did not). Workable.

[BuzzKill 9]

Pink Elephant please don't respond further to this thread.  Your input has proven to have no value.  YT was an example of a bad bug in the android app that took EN staff over a year to address.  It was merely an example of why my expectations are low in regard to having issues addressed by EN.  You, apparently, totally missed that point.  Imagine clipping a YT page and then hours later your phone, sitting on your desk with the screen off suddenly starts blaring a YT video.  That's a serious bug and they did reproduce it.  Yet it remained unfixed for over a year.  Get it now?  And now you tell this other gentleman that the legacy windows app is EOL.  That doesn't help him.  The only thing it says is "suck it up buttercup and deal with it".  Very helpful.  And the fact that you don't get the value of grep-like search capability tells me you have little IT expertise because you just...don't....get...it.  My legacy windows app was replaced by EN without telling me that the 'upgrade' was going to uninstall it.  I was not happy about that.  And am REALLY not happy to discover a feature I heavily depend on doesn't seem to be there - Create Table of Contents.  Please don't respond to this post either unless you have something truly constructive to provide and not one of your dead-end comments.

[BuzzKill 9]

44 minutes ago, Gone South said:

Thanks, Mike P. 

Got this to work, albeit with a few "false positives" (^3 showed where :3 did not). Workable.

Here's a link to the legacy app if you still need it - https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052560314-Install-an-older-version-of-Evernote

[PinkElephant 5,157]

@BuzzKill You can decide where you post - you can’t decide where I post.

And that is it what needed to be said - although it should be pretty obvious.