[X4U] Re: spotlight question - search for a phrase

[Kirk McElhearn]

On Nov 21, 2008, at 5:01 PM, stephen e. schwartz wrote:

> Thank you kirk. Briefly, no, not working for me to find a character  
> string or phrase of interest. I offer an example.
>
> In the following I am using command-F, and entering the indicated  
> text into the contents box obtained with pulldown window.
>
> The phrase I am looking for is "consonant with a given agreed upon  
> allowable" which I know to be present in at least one pdf document  
> and one word document.
>
> Here are the number of items found
>
> "consonant with a given agreed upon allowable"   56
>
> consonant with any agreed upon allowable   56
>
> allowable consonant agreed   56
>
> consonant allowable agreed   56
>
> consonant allowable   64
>
>
> (the items found are pdf documents, html, and documents.)
>
> so it seems to me that the spotlight is finding all documents that  
> contain all those words (the intersection of the sets of documents  
> containing consonant, allowable, and agreed) and NOT the character  
> string that I am looking for.
>
> So back to my question, how to find the documents that contain a  
> specific character string or phrase, including spaces.

I'm guessing that your problem has something to do with line breaks;  
I've seen this when searching for strings in PDF files.

Spotlight does find all documents containing all words (it's an AND  
search). So you'll just have to open each of the PDF files it finds  
and do a find inside them to see where your string is. But it may have  
the same problem with line breaks, so look just for, say, consonant.



Kirk
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