Evernote doesn't find notes if word is preceded with underscore

[abdu 48]

if I have a text like john_smith in a note and I search for smith, that note doesn't show up.

Is there a way to make such search work?

[CalS 5,307]

EN doesn't do within text searches, everything starts from the beginning of the word. 

To find the above you would need to search for john_smith.  If you changed your process to john.smith a search on smith would find the note since EN ignores the . in text searches.  FYI the _ is one of the special characters that is searchable in EN.

[abdu 48]

The thing is that I know smith exists somewhere but not john_smith.

It would be nice if there's an advanced setting where we can tell EN that a character like _ is searchable or not.

Thanks.

[CalS 5,307]

Yeah, there isn't really a list of special characters that are searchable, but basically I think the underscore is one of the few if not only.

Whatever the case the text in the middle of a "word" is not, so the _ in john_smith creates one word, and text searches are from the beginning of the word only.  Workaround is to replace the _ with a . to create john.smith and, then the smith search will work the way you want.

[abdu 48]

Well in my case, the text is a password. I can't change it. The whole idea is to be able to find it.. not change it after the fact.

[CalS 5,307]

Well, until EN makes adjustments to text search you may have to find another way to search for smith. 

[abdu 48]

Does EN build a search index which it uses for searching? 

[CalS 5,307]

Just now, DTLow said:

Would this be covered in the latest version of Windows

• Search for notebooks and tags more efficiently. Search terms now match within words instead of prefix.

Nope, not for text in the note.  The within search is only for tag and notebook names.

[CalS 5,307]

39 minutes ago, abdu said:

Does EN build a search index which it uses for searching? 

Yes.  I don't know the particulars of it.

[JMichaelTX 4,118]

1 hour ago, abdu said:

Well in my case, the text is a password.

If you are using Evernote to store passwords, I'd recommend using another tool, like 1Password.  I've used it for years, and highly recommend it:

• Unlike Evernote, it is highly secure, using a potent cocktail of AES-256 encryption and PBKDF2 key derivation ensures that no one but you can see into your data
• Has an app for all of the major platforms
• Syncs using Dropbox
• Makes creating and using passwords very easy
• Has a very reasonable price, with many updates at no cost.

[JMichaelTX 4,118]

2 hours ago, csihilling said:

Yeah, there isn't really a list of special characters that are searchable, but basically I think the underscore is one of the few if not only.

According to Evernote Search Grammar, only letters, numbers, and underscore are allowable "word characters", which means they are the only characters that can be included in a search:

Quote

wordchar = ? any Unicode Letter or Number (Unicode character classes L and N) or underscore '_' ? ;