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Partial Word Search / Search for String Within a String


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Posted

I would like to be able to search for a sequence of characters within a word or character string.

For example, I have an app that records my mobilephone calls and sends them to Evernote with the title Record_2012_11_01_15-27-48_02072721234.amr.

I want to be able to search for all notes with this phone number, i.e. "02072721234" but I cannot currently do so because Evernote only searches for strings begining with my search term, not all string containing my search term.

  • Level 5
Posted

Evernote only searches for strings begining with my search term

That is correct.

The Evernote indexing system is designed for speed; not every possible mathematical sequence of characters.

Posted

Evernote only searches for strings begining with my search term

That is correct.

The Evernote indexing system is designed for speed; not every possible mathematical sequence of characters.

Really helpful reply. Thank you so much.

  • Level 5*
Posted

Evernote only searches for strings begining with my search term

That is correct.

The Evernote indexing system is designed for speed; not every possible mathematical sequence of characters.

Really helpful reply. Thank you so much.

As jbenson noted, Evernote is set up to search only from the beginning of a term. I think that Evernote explains this limitation as one imposed because of concerns about the scalability of the service. See the Evernote Search Grammar document for more (http://dev.evernote....rch_grammar.php).

If you are working in OSX, then you have a powerful alternative search tool with Spotlight (http://www.princeton...ght-search.html). Spotlight also has this limitation of searching only from the beginning of words. However, Spotlight indexes everything on your drive, so if you use an app like HoudahSpot, you can search within words. It's a little expensive for an app, but they have a generous trial period, and I have found the purchase worthwhile.

Unfortunately for Windows folks, the Evernote files there are contained in a database, and as far as I know, it is not accessible to search applications.

Posted

Funnily enough, I have just discovered that a search on "+447811" finds "Record_2012_11_01_13-07-46_+447811123456.amr" but a search on "07811" does not find "Record_2012_11_01_13-07-46_07811123456".

Why is that?

  • Level 5*
Posted

I think underlines count as characters, while the "+" sign is treated as a null or a space, so your "+447811" translates as a string beginning with 447811...

For the reasons discussed above I don't use underlines in file names / titles. It does help searches.

Posted

Funnily enough, I have just discovered that a search on "+447811" finds "Record_2012_11_01_13-07-46_+447811123456.amr" but a search on "07811" does not find "Record_2012_11_01_13-07-46_07811123456".

Why is that?

Yup - Gazumped is right. In Evernoteland, "words" are defined as a series of letters & numbers & the underscore. Everything else is a delimter.

Posted

Yup - Gazumped is right. In Evernoteland, "words" are defined as a series of letters & numbers & the underscore. Everything else is a delimter.

Does that mean the "+" sign makes Evernote treat the following characters as a new word? That would explain my result. It is a shame that it treats underscore as a character, but I can see why, as some people seem to use it.

Posted

Yup - Gazumped is right. In Evernoteland, "words" are defined as a series of letters & numbers & the underscore. Everything else is a delimter.

Does that mean the "+" sign makes Evernote treat the following characters as a new word? That would explain my result. It is a shame that it treats underscore as a character, but I can see why, as some people seem to use it.

Yes, everything else is a delimiter.

  • 6 months later...
Posted

According to the search grammar: "If no advanced search modifier is found in a search term, it will be matched against the note as a text content search. Words or quoted phrases must exactly match a word or phrase in the note contents, note title, tag name, or recognition index. Words in the content of the note are split by whitespace or punctuation. Words may end in a wildcard to match the start of a word."

 

This seems to imply that unless there is an explicit wildcard, partial words will not match. However, my experience, and the posts on this thread, suggest otherwise. Is the search grammmar description out of date?

  • Level 5*
Posted

According to the search grammar: "If no advanced search modifier is found in a search term, it will be matched against the note as a text content search. Words or quoted phrases must exactly match a word or phrase in the note contents, note title, tag name, or recognition index. Words in the content of the note are split by whitespace or punctuation. Words may end in a wildcard to match the start of a word."

 

This seems to imply that unless there is an explicit wildcard, partial words will not match. However, my experience, and the posts on this thread, suggest otherwise. Is the search grammmar description out of date?

Not with respect to text matching, as far as I know, it's up to date. What can happen, though, is that a particular Evernote client may add a wildcard to the end of a text search string behind the scenes, so that partial matching occurs whether the user asks for it or not. In other words, if you type a search of abc, the search string submitted to Evernote search will abc*, yielding a partial match. I know that the Windows client does this, for example.

  • 11 months later...
Posted

HodahSpot (http://houdah.com/) provides a work around for this issue. You can set up a saved search that looks specifically at your ~/Library/CoreData/com.evernote.Evernote/ folder.  It is, of course, much slower than a Spotlight or an Evernote search. But it provides a very robust search syntax.  If you're pulling your hair out trying to find an important document, as I was, I suspect you'll be willing to wait a few extra seconds. The pricetag for the App is a bit high, but the trial version might be sufficient if you're only using it occasionally.

  • Level 5*
Posted

HodahSpot (http://houdah.com/) provides a work around for this issue. You can set up a saved search that looks specifically at your ~/Library/CoreData/com.evernote.Evernote/ folder.  It is, of course, much slower than a Spotlight or an Evernote search. But it provides a very robust search syntax.  If you're pulling your hair out trying to find an important document, as I was, I suspect you'll be willing to wait a few extra seconds. The pricetag for the App is a bit high, but the trial version might be sufficient if you're only using it occasionally.

 

I cannot say enough good things about this app for Mac folks and it is well worth the price. I use it every day to manage all of my files. I haven't found it to be slow at all.

 

[Edit:] I've removed your other posts. Please refrain from copy/pasting posts into other threads. Thanks!

Posted

HodahSpot (http://houdah.com/) provides a work around for this issue. You can set up a saved search that looks specifically at your ~/Library/CoreData/com.evernote.Evernote/ folder.  It is, of course, much slower than a Spotlight or an Evernote search. But it provides a very robust search syntax.  If you're pulling your hair out trying to find an important document, as I was, I suspect you'll be willing to wait a few extra seconds. The pricetag for the App is a bit high, but the trial version might be sufficient if you're only using it occasionally.

Very expensive to perform search I can do with freewares.

 

If I encounter such problem I'd export the notebook (or a part of it) and use a text editor like notepad++ to  search.I could eventually use regex and find/replace features.

  • Level 5*
Posted

 

HodahSpot (http://houdah.com/) provides a work around for this issue. You can set up a saved search that looks specifically at your ~/Library/CoreData/com.evernote.Evernote/ folder.  It is, of course, much slower than a Spotlight or an Evernote search. But it provides a very robust search syntax.  If you're pulling your hair out trying to find an important document, as I was, I suspect you'll be willing to wait a few extra seconds. The pricetag for the App is a bit high, but the trial version might be sufficient if you're only using it occasionally.

Very expensive to perform search I can do with freewares.

 

If I encounter such problem I'd export the notebook (or a part of it) and use a text editor like notepad++ to  search.I could eventually use regex and find/replace features.

 

 

I think you might be able to do everything in Spotlight (Mac), but the HoudahSpot interface makes it a breeze. I can go through terabytes of data to find exactly the file I want in a few seconds. I've been experimenting with tags (openmeta and mavericks), and these are also pretty cool to include in the search as well.Yeah, you could use grep or some other method, but I think that the app is worth it for the interface. 

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