Significant and Insignificant Characters

Have you ever wanted to search on a price list with the $ symbol, or search an @ symbol to find an e-mail address? Well ISYS provides the ability to search on special characters.

You can add any character you wish to search upon into the Significant Character list. All you need to do is run ISYS Utilities.

Once ISYS Utilities is started and making sure that the correct index is open, you now need to do the following steps to ensure you set any special characters:

1. Click 'Index Options' from the 'Tools' menu.
2. Select the 'Characters' tab.
3. Type a character you would like to search on into the 'significant' field.
4. Once you are happy with the changes you have made to either field click on the OK button.
5. You will then be prompted with a message 'Note: you have changed one or more options which require a CREATE or REINDEX before they will be reflected in your index'. Once you have clicked on the OK button, it will take you back to the ISYS Utilities menu.
6. From the main menu choose the 'Actions' menu then 'Reindex'. You will get a message telling you that this may take some time and it will completely rebuild your index. Click the OK button to start the reindex.

Note: you can choose to delete characters from the significant and insignificant fields as well as add new characters.

Lets now look at an example of when we may use this feature of ISYS.

Having added the @ symbol to the significant field and reindexed our database we can now perform searches and have a result of e-mail addresses.

If you are indexing your e-mail, you may find this quite useful. Or being a recruitment agency you may have resume documents, and may like to find all the e-mail addresses of a particular job skill.

Let's say we have resume documents and we are looking particular for candidates with 'Visual Basic' skill. Having found these candidates we'd like to e-mail them and let them know that a new job is on offer.

Once again we need to make sure ISYS Query is started and we have the correct index open. Having done this we would do the following: -

1. Click on the button from the toolbar menu, or select a query (Menu Assisted) by choosing Menu Assisted from the 'Query' menu.
2. Type 'Visual Basic' that is the skill we were looking for and click on 'OK'.
3. Select 'Query within current results' from the 'Query' menu. You will notice that the query window (Menu Assisted) will appear once again.
4. This time you can type '*@*' and click on OK. The asterisk symbols are used to search for any number of characters.
5. You will notice that ISYS will highlight all e-mail addresses. We'd now like to have a print out of all e-mail addresses of these candidates. So we would select 'Extract' from the 'Tools' menu.
6. ISYS will display the extract window. From here select the 'Word hitlist' and then select where you would like to extract it to, in our case it would be to the 'Printer', and then click on the OK button.

Definitions

Significant Characters
The characters you enter into the significant field are considered as an important part of a word. If you have added the @ symbol to the significant field, then when you are searching for an e-mail address like bob@isys.com.au it will highlight the whole searched term including the @ symbol.

Insignificant Characters
The characters entered here into the insignificant field are characters, which are part of a word but are not regarded as important. Insignificant characters are treated as if they are invisible. Having added the hyphen to insignificant, then words that are hyphenated will be treated as one word, for example post-graduate would be indexed as postgraduate.

For instance, if the hyphen is not in either list, then our example above, post-graduate is indexed as two words post and graduate. Normally the space, full stop and common should be punctuation characters unless the full stop has been configured to be indexed when embedded within a word.

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