Trying to learn Visual Filters; need help

I finally found some time to get back to this.

Thanks a lot, all of you, but I'm afraid I can't make any of these work all that well.

Mark Barnes said:

the BEFORE 2 WORDS day works, but has false positives - it will also match the phrase "the day"
the BEFORE 2 WORDS day ANDNOT "the day" works, although it would exclude verses that include both the phrase "the x day" and "the day" in them - though there aren't any in Genesis.

These two, and Dave's version, mark 'the' and 'day', but not the number in between.

Mark Barnes said:

"the * day" -  is easiest, but is painfully slow.

You could say that again! Just when I started, Time Machine decided that that would be a great time to not only do the hourly update, but also reindex my entire external harddrive. Yeah... Took about half an hour to get two searches done...

The words finally get marked all right, and I can create a filter, but the filter takes so long to show up that I took for granted it hadn't worked (and was about to post and say so). (I guess that's what happened before the first post as well, when I actually did try this one.)

It also works better in Swedish than in English: in English it marks [God called] 'the light "day"' as well. But I guess that can be fixed with ANDNOT.

Mark Barnes said:

• the BEFORE 1 WORD (first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh) BEFORE 1 WORD day works perfectly

...

• "And there was evening and there was morning, the" BEFORE 1 WORD (first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth,
  seventh) BEFORE 1 WORD day

Work, but aren't all that funny to write out when you're working in 4 languages... And, obviously, not even the English translations use the exact same words.

Also, you have to change the colour of the text itself; if you use underlining or a highlighter it will break off before and after the number.

Mark Barnes said:

"וַֽיְהִי־עֶ֥רֶב וַֽיְהִי־בֹ֖קֶר י֥וֹם שֵׁנִֽי׃"

Works, but obviously only for the second day. And with a * you're back to the "painfully slow".

 

In Swedish I ended up with the following three-line filter for now:

• 
  "Och det blev afton, och det blev morgon, den * dagen."
• "den * dagen"
• "* dagen" ANDNOT "den dagen."

This works perfectly to mark all references to a particular day in Gen 1-2, but it takes an incredibly long time to show up. Doing a similar search in a longer text and all 4 languages I work with would be virtually impossible. (Correction: this worked perfectly yesterday; today, when I clicked it off and then on again under the filter icon, it gives a slightly different, and not correct, result. The very same filter!)

Is there a way to write the faster filters such that all words are marked continuously, and not separately?
Is there a way to change the ridiculously long formula "(first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh)" into something with an @? 
Is there a way to make a filter like this show up in different translations and languages, without having to rewrite it for each of them separately?

(I guess I'm choosing the very worst time to post this; everyone now being busy on the new website... (As I will be in a moment).)

 

Mark

I got caught up with other things, so I never tried out this suggestion until today, and therefore never got back to you with a thanks. Sorry! It works, but only with certain Bibles, none of which I regularly use, unfortunately. It works with NRSV, but not with NRSVCE, NAB or any Swedish Bible. I guess they're not tagged the right way. 

No, wait a moment! It doesn't catch "the first day". Why on earth not?

You're quite right! The main purpose, though, wasn't the highlighting itself, but learning to use visual filters, and I've learnt quite a few things in the process... [:)] 

(And as for interlinears, the Bibles I use don't have them. [:(] )

Thanks a lot, Kevin!

With five different combinations of last two letters in Swedish it's hardly worth writing it precisely like that (you might as well write out the whole words and get a faster search), but I tried "den *a dagen" OR "den *e dagen", which actually finished in about a third of the time of "den * dagen". I couldn't imagine something that simple could make that much difference! And it seems like a more complicated search, not a simpler one...

I also tried creating a Passage List out of the results and then researching just that Passage List, but it only cut off about 5 seconds, so it's not worth it. 109 seconds is still slow, but it's an awful lot better than 330 or more. And I've got an almost 2GB large swap file right now, so a restart might speed things up a bit further. (EDIT: 57s after restart.)

The link looks interesting, but I haven't had time to look at syntax searches yet, so I'll put it in my syntax bookmark folder and read it later on. I have yet to learn a few more basic things first.

(Hey, Rosie, look how much I'm learning through this! [;)] )