Punctuation and special words

Punctuation

Perceptive Search treats punctuation in a query in one of three ways:

• Significant
  This means the punctuated search word or phrase will match only with words or phrases containing matching punctuation characters.
• Insignificant
  Perceptive Search ignores the occurrence of specified punctuation in the text, meaning that a search will bring up matching words and phrases, whether punctuated or not.
• Separators
  Some punctuation marks will not be recognized as such by Perceptive Search, and treated the same way as spaces between words. For example 'over-charge' will be indexed as two words - 'over' and 'charge'. By default the period, or full stop, is a punctuation character and thus not indexed; however, Perceptive Search can be configured to index a period when it is embedded within a word.

You can change the configuration of punctuation in an index via the index options.

Reserved Words

Reserved words are those used as Perceptive Search operators, for example AND, OR, NOT, LABEL and EXCEPT. If you need to include a reserved a word in a query, precede the word with an insignificant character such as an underscore (_). This is a signal to Perceptive Search to include the word as ordinary text in the search, and not an operator.

The // and \\ operators can be included in a search, if necessary, by enclosing them in quotes (i.e."//" and "\\").

Common Words

Common words are words such as I, THE, IT IS, and other words that frequently appear in many documents, but do not frequently have a significant meaning. They are excluded from searches in order to save indexing space.

• If your search includes a common word, Perceptive Search will remove it from the search and reconstruct the search around the gap. For example, 'beside the road' becomes 'beside /2,2/ road' automatically.
• Where the common word includes a Boolean or positional operator, the word is ignored. For example, 'manager and the' becomes simply 'manager'
• If you need to search for words that are automatically defined as Common, the Common Word List will need to be amended.