Advanced Search Help, Tips, and Techniques

The Advanced Search page provides a powerful interface for searching the database. From this page you may search across any field in the database and up to five fields at a time.

Select Match ALL fields to show results that match ALL the fields you are searching in. This is an AND based search.
Select Match ANY fields to show results that match ANY of the fields you are searching in. This is an OR base search.

From the drop-down box on the left, select the field you wish to search in.
From the middle drop-down box, select the type of search you would like to perform.
Enter your search terms into the text box on the right.

Types of Searches
A Contains search will match the search terms anywhere in the field. For example searching in the Title field for 'pillar fire' will match any works that contain 'pillar' and 'fire' in the title. A contains search will also match parts of words. Searching for 'fire' will also match words that have 'fire' in them, such as 'fires', 'fireside', and 'starfire'.

An Equals search will only return results that exactly match the search phrase.

A Does NOT Contain search will return the opposite results of a normal Contains search. For example a Does NOT Contain search in the title for 'fire' will return all the results that do not have fire anywhere in the title.

A Does NOT Equal search returns the opposite of an Equals.

A Regular Expression search uses Unix style regular expressions and is the most powerful of all, but also the most complicated. For example, if you search for '^fire.*' in the title field, you would get all the works whose title begins with 'fire'. For more information on regular expressions supported by this database see http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/Regexp.html

Below is a list useful regular expressions you may want to use:

• .+ - matches 1 or more character. (Useful for finding out how many items have data in a particular field)
• [0-9] - matches any digit 0-9
• [a-zA-Z] - matches any letter lowercase or uppercase
• (bill)|(bob) - matches items that contain "bill" or "bob"
• ^a - items that begin with "a"
• z$ - items that end with "z"

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Feedback: GideonBurton@byu.edu