[X4U] Re: Re: spotlight question - search for a phrase (Kirk McElhearn)

[stephen e. schwartz]

Kirk wrote:

>Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:09:34 +0100
>From: Kirk McElhearn <kirkmc at mac.com>
>Subject: Re: [X4U] Re: spotlight question - search for a phrase
>To: "A place to discuss Mac OS X for the casual user."
>	<x4u at listserver.themacintoshguy.com>
>
>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, thanks for your further reply. But I am _not_ looking for an 
AND search; I am looking for a _string_ search. I dont want all the 
documents that contain all of the words in the string; I want all 
documents that contain the string. Still looking for a way to do this.

I dont beieve its a line break issue either; I chose a phrase that in 
at least one document has no line breaks just to avoid that possible 
issue. Though I would think that a clever search engine would ignore 
line breaks.

Google can find these docunments on the entire web faster and more 
accurately than I can on my own mac.

Results 1 - 4 of 4 for "consonant with any agreed upon allowable". 
(0.24 seconds)

-steve

>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.
>
>
>Kirk
>
>

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