(Archived) Hyphenated searches are broken

[ThatAdamGuy 15]

Searches for my friend Ting-Yu failed to bring up the relevant notes.

Instead, Evernote searched for Ting NOT Yu.  Oops

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Searches for my friend Ting-Yu failed to bring up the relevant notes.

Instead, Evernote searched for Ting NOT Yu.  Oops

 

This is not broken.  Instead, it's the way the EN search works & is expected behaviour.  Words are letters, numbers & the underscore.  Everything else is a delimter.  In the search bar, -YU is indeed looking for notes that do not contain "yu".  You could try enclosing it in quotes "Ting-Yu" but I'm not sure that works correctly all the time.

[allen 39]

I'd have expected delimiters to be preceded by white space. Hyphenated words are not uncommon and should be taken into account, no?

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I'd have expected delimiters to be preceded by white space. Hyphenated words are not uncommon and should be taken into account, no?

If a delimiter is preceded by a white space, then it's not a delimiter; the white space is. ;-)

I would imagine EN folks took this into consideration, since, as you say, hyphenated words are not uncommon. OTOH, if enclosing in quotes (as I mentioned above) doesn't work, you can search on both parts of the word, enclosed in quotes like:

"ting "yu"

This will cause the search engine to look only for those words & not include words such as 'tingle'.

[jefito 5,598]

I'd have expected delimiters to be preceded by white space. Hyphenated words are not uncommon and should be taken into account, no?

The search grammar doc (http://dev.evernote.com/documentation/cloud/chapters/search_grammar.php) says otherwise, I think. Literal words (as distinct from quoted literals) in the search query must consit only of "wordchar"s ("any Unicode Letter or Number (Unicode character classes L and N) or underscore '_')". So the parser looks at the search Ting-Yu and reads wordchars up to the '-'. Since '-' not a wordchar, parsing pauses, and "Ting" is set aside as a literal search term. Parsing then continues with the as-yet unhandled '-'. That's a match for the first part of one of the definitions of "term", and it means "negate what follows". What follows is "Yu", so we wind up with a search for notes that contain "Ting" but do not contain "Yu". Quoting Ting-Yu ("Ting-Yu") makes it produce the desired result.

[Bryan Sullo 5]

I'd have expected delimiters to be preceded by white space. Hyphenated words are not uncommon and should be taken into account, no?

If a delimiter is preceded by a white space, then it's not a delimiter; the white space is. ;-)

Technically correct, but what I believe the poster meant is that he would expect operators such as "-" to be delimited by a space, and when they are not, to be treated as part of the string.