Re: wildcard woes

On 2009-09-21 08:53:42 -0700, Tim <tswalton@xxxxxxxxx> said:

I have several records with text in a text field like this...
"Yellow Category, Red Category"
(without the quotes)

I want to find any record with yellow and red in the same sentence.
Thinking the wildcards would work I try this

new find
*yellow*red*
new find
*red*yellow*
preform find

but it never finds anything! try it, you will see.
what is up with wildcards? and how can I achieve this search?

I think you have a misunderstanding of the basics of finding in Filemaker. Perhaps some time spent with the help file? Or a manual?

In brief, Filemaker does a word search from the beginning of a word, for any string you put into a field. If you put multiple words in a field, FM will search for all of them. There is no order to the search, though.

So for your desired searching a single request with "red yellow" in the field will work. That is an AND search in FM.

An OR search would enter, in the same field:

Enter find
"red"
new request
"yellow"
perform find

WIld card characters are used to find a string after the beginning of the word or for strings followed by anything, so if you wanted to find, in a field that may contain "blue-green" and "yellow-green", you could do a find for "*green".

When you enter find mode, in the status bar you'll find a pulldown for all the symbols you can enter during finds, such as "!" to find duplicates in a field or "==" for exact matches. These might be of assistance if you look them up in the help file and see how they are used in FM. It's not the same as a search engine.

--
Lynn Allen
--
www.semiotics.com
Member FBA
FM 10 Certified Developer

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: wildcard woes
    ... Thinking the wildcards would work I try this ... for any string you put into a field. ... So for your desired searching a single request with "red yellow"  in ... Oddly I would describe myself as an FMP expert, ...
    (comp.databases.filemaker)
  • Re: WildCard Key
    ... But I have a new need to support filenames based on wildcards. ... I'd use a prefix tree aka trie both ... An empty string matches a terminal vertex ... stars that contains at least one star, ...
    (microsoft.public.vc.stl)
  • Re: Help configuring Symantec NIS ad blocking - tech support is worthless
    ... > Wildcards do not work when adding strings to the NIS ad blocking list. ... finally issued a specific response. ... will match for the length of the supplied rule string. ...
    (comp.security.firewalls)
  • Re: Find and Replace
    ... wildcards but will just have to sit down and get to grips with them through ... Greg Maxey/Word MVP ... MarkN wrote: ... Again <s anchors the start of a find string to a word starting with ...
    (microsoft.public.word.docmanagement)
  • Re: [PHP] Slow searches in large database
    ... LIKE putting in wildcards for and aft e.g %string% slows down queries ... > We have a mysql database that has approximately 20,000 records and has a ...
    (php.general)