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

[stephen e. schwartz]

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.

thanks

-steve

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>
>Message: 4
>Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:12:29 +0100
>From: Kirk McElhearn <kirkmc at mac.com>
>Subject: Re: [X4U] spotlight question - search for a phrase
>To: "A place to discuss Mac OS X for the casual user."
>	<x4u at listserver.themacintoshguy.com>
>Message-ID: <594E9AF5-0E84-47B1-B877-E9EADA7F4FCC at mac.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes
>
>
>On Nov 20, 2008, at 9:13 PM, stephen e. schwartz wrote:
>
>>  Is there a way to get spotlight to search for a character string 
>>  that includes spaces, as in google, such as by putting the phrase in 
>>  quotes "search for this phrase" to bring up just those documents 
>>  that contain that phrase?
>
>Just use quotes; you actually don't even need to close the quotes. 
>Why, is that not working for you?
>
>Kirk

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