Search Tips for Webglimpse

Webglimpse supports boolean-style queries and wildcards, as well as some limited regular expressions. Words separated by spaces are treated as a connected phrase. To signify AND, OR and NOT, use the punctuation symbols ";" (semicolon), "," (comma), "~" (tilde). You may nest expressions using the symbols "{" and "}" (curly braces) to signify parenthesis. You may use the '#' character for wildcard matching.

Example boolean queries:

will match documents containing the words "Jesus" and "Messiah" anywhere in the document
will match documents containing the word "Jew" or the word "Gentile"
will match documents containing the word "Jesus" or "Messiah" but not the word "Satan"

Example use of wildcard #:

will match 'jew' and 'jewish' but not 'majewski'. This is different than checking the 'partial match' box in the query form, which would match all three patterns.
will match all patterns mentioned above - 'jew', 'jewish' and 'majewski'. This is the same effect as checking the 'partial match' box, but checking the box would be faster.
will match patterns like www.anything.com
When using complex queries like the above, you may sometimes get matches to code inside HTML tags instead of to the visible text in the file. To avoid this, check the "Use Filters" box in the search options form. (You should always check this box when searching non-ascii type documents, like PDF or Word files. If you don't see it on the form, it may have been automatically checked for you in a hidden tag.)

There's more...

The above examples cover the most common types of queries. Webglimpse (and glimpse) also can accept a limited form of regular expressions, including support for the '|', '*', '[]' characters and parentheses. Please see the Glimpse man page Patterns section for all the gory details. You will need to know that Webglimpse calls glimpse with the switches -U -W -j -y -z , plus others determined by the checkboxes on the form. View the source of the results page for the exact call to glimpse made by a particular webglimpse query.

Note: The above document is for the commercial/contributors version of Webglimpse. EDU and demo versions that do not have the translator module have to use the original ',' for OR, ';' for AND, and '~' for NOT

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