Search Keywords:

You can use the words AND, OR and NOT to form more complicated search patterns. For example, geomview and manual is the same as geomview manual, while geomview or manual matches any title that contains either the word geomview or the word manual. The pattern geomview and not manual matches those titles that contain the word geomview but that do not contain the word manual.

Normally, AND operations are done before OR operations, so geomview and manual or weboogl and zoo matches any titles either containing both geomview and manual or containing both weboogl and zoo. We say that the precedence of AND is greater than that of OR. The precedence of NOT is the highest of all, so not manual and geomview matches all the titles that do not contain the word manual but do contain geomview.

You can use parentheses to change the order of operations. For example, geomview and (manual or weboogl) and zoo matches any title containing either manual or weboogl and containing both geomview and zoo, while not (manual and geomview) matches any title that does not contain both the words manual and geomview.

Normally, keywords are separated by spaces. If you want to include a space in one of your keywords, then enclose the keyword in quotation marks. For example "geomview manual" matches those titles that contain the characters geomview manual as a substring. Note that this is different from specifying the keywords geomview manual, which is the same as geomview and manual, which matches the words geomview and manual anywhere in the title (for example, these will match A Manual for Geomview, while the quoted keywords will not).

You can use quotes to do searches that use the words AND, OR and NOT; for example, the keywords "math and science" matches only those titles containing the phrase math and science, while the keywords math and science matches any title containing both words math and science, and math "and" science with match any title containing all three words math, and, and science (for example, the title Science and Math).

Keywords themselves can be more than just a literal words like geomview; they actually can be perl regular expressions, in which some characters have special meanings. For example, the period (.) matches any character, and the asterisk (*) allows the previous letter to be repeated an arbitrary number of times, while the plus (+) matches the previous character one or more times (see the perl manual for more details). If you want to look for one of these characters literally, precede it by a back-slash (\), as in Dr\. Science.

Some examples may help you understand the syntax for the keywords patterns.

The Geometry Center Home Page

Comments to: webmaster@geom.umn.edu
Created: Sep 12 1995 --- Last modified: Jun 18 1996