Search for specific punctuation

How can a search require specific punctuation? For example, how would I search for Jesus' (with the apostrophe)? I tried using quotation marks ("Jesus'"), but the apostrophe is ignored. Deselecting "Match All Word Forms" in the search Panel menu makes no difference.

Find more posts tagged with

Desktop App

Comments

Rosie Perera

You can't. Logos doesn't index punctuation.

Dave Hooton

For example, how would I search for Jesus' (with the apostrophe)? I tried using quotation marks ("Jesus'"), but the apostrophe is ignored.

It is ignored, being at the end of a word. But you can search uniquely for God's, Lord's, etc.

Harry Hahne

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1070168#Comment_1070168

It is ignored, being at the end of a word. But you can search uniquely for God's, Lord's, etc.

Bummer.

Michal Lopianowski

Harry,

I wanted to do this as well. The only way I could make it work is just search for Jesus, and then export the results to a new Word document and then in Word search for Jesus with the apostrophe mark.

Harry Hahne

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1248647#Comment_1248647

Harry,

I wanted to do this as well. The only way I could make it work is just search for Jesus, and then export the results to a new Word document and then in Word search for Jesus with the apostrophe mark.

This is a good workaround.

I would like to suggest a Match Punctuation option, which would be a button alongside Match All Word Forms and Match Case.

The way this search would work is if the search term included punctuation, after Logos created a passage list from the index of the key words, it would cull out verses that do not match the punctuation. It would only show the passage list after this additional culling step. This would result in a slower search only when a search term included punctuation, but otherwise it would make no difference.

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1248671#Comment_1248671

I would like to suggest a Match Punctuation option, which would be a button alongside Match All Word Forms and Match Case.

That is not feasible because the Indexer ignores punctuation except in cases like God’s, where a straight quote in Search will match a curly quote in the resource. Note the resource Find (CTRL+F) must be supplied a curly quote in order to get a match. So you can find Jesus' with curly quote if you copy an instance from the text!

A Search convention of comma for OR was used in Logos 9 and that it is now ignored. But colon has a special meaning and it will be queried if used incorrectly. And double straight quotes are used to delimit strings.

IF punctuation was recognised by the Indexer and [Match Punctuation] was specified would you expect "Go into the ark, to be recognised when the text has a curly quote as well as having to be terminated by a comma? It would also require a match.punctuation if it is part of a query e.g.

match.punctuation:""Go into the ark," INTERSECTS culture:"Flood Epic"

The parser would have to correctly interpret the opening/closing quotes and then the culture datatype will be properly recognised.

DMB

Using the Find, it 'finds' punctuation easily enough (text, instead of a formal search). The key is to copy an example from the resource (instead of using the keyboard, Mac in my case).

Harry Hahne

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1248834#Comment_1248834

I would like to suggest a Match Punctuation option, which would be a button alongside Match All Word Forms and Match Case.

That is not feasible because the Indexer ignores punctuation except in cases like God’s, where a straight quote in Search will match a curly quote in the resource.

It is certainly possible to create software that searches for punctuation marks, even with word indexes that do not include punctuation marks. Years ago, I wrote database software that uses an algorithm similar to what I described earlier.

For what it's worth, some competing Bible programs allow searches that include specific punctuation marks. As I recall, the older Logos Libronix versions allowed it through the Graphical Search.

I can certainly understand that FL might not consider this search capability a priority. I don't think that it is as important as some other features. I raised it as a suggestion when I came across a situation where I tried to do such a search. But as others have suggested, there are hacks to work around this limitation.

Dave Hooton

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1248871#Comment_1248871

It is certainly possible to create software that searches for punctuation marks, even with word indexes that do not include punctuation marks.

Agree. First match the words from the Index and then match the punctuation to the resource.