Wildcards

[Ineke_Huysman@adobeforums.com]

Why isn't it possible to search with wildcards (like * and ?) in Acrobat 6? In Acrobat 5 it used to be possible. What is the alternative?

[Ian_Burton@home_in_Paris.fr]

In Acrobat Pro and Reader 6.01 the help specifies that * and ? cannot be used to searh in Acrobat 6 Indexes, and stemming searches. It does not say you can't use them in other forms of search. But just a few experiments show that * and ? are interpreted as literal characters and not wildcard characters.

Thanks for pointing this out. Yet another example of useful features from 5 missing in 6. In this case the search engiine from 5 was replaced by a "better" one for 6.
Cheers
Ian

[Ian_Mellors@adobeforums.com]

is it not true that you don't need wildcards in the 6.0 search functionality?

the search string 'day' should find

day
today
monday
days

etc etc

[Ian_Burton@home_in_Paris.fr]

But wouldn't a search for SGML, XML, and HTML require separate searches instead of one search for *ML? Would stemming be able to sort out numbers in the range 1110222 and 1119222 or would there need to be ten searches, instead of one search for 111?222? How does one find all the acrrd.* file names in a manual because you don't know which one you really need information about?

I agree there's lots can be done in the advanced search with all the options, but there seems to be certain things that could be done more conveniently with wildcards. Instead all the individual searches have to be done for the literals.
Cheers
Ian

[W_T_Allen@adobeforums.com]

But wouldn't a search for SGML, XML, and HTML require separate searches
instead of one search for *ML?




No, search for "ML."

[Ian_Burton@home_in_Paris.fr]

Clearly the *ml was not a good example for my point. But I tried it just the same. In the collection there were 146 html, 628 xml, and 1888 sgml - Total 2662. There are 2660 instances of ml. These are the search results numbers. Now I wonder how long it would take to work out what's going on here. Nothing like reliable predictable searches that give you confidence. If there were more ml than the total of sgml, html, and xml I would not have been concerned, but how can search possibly find less? Maybe it's not quite so reliable after all.

Wildcards can be a timesaver - nice to have when you need them. Reliable search results are more than "nice to have".
Cheers
Ian

[W_T_Allen@adobeforums.com]

You're preaching to the choir, man, I agree 110%.

[Fr._Watson@adobeforums.com]

I don't have access to AA6 "Pro" at this moment, but I have a memory that wildcards are available under the "Advanced" search features (I could be wrong).

[Ian_Burton@home_in_Paris.fr]

When I tried * and ? in Acrobat Pro 6.01 Advanced search they seemed to be treated as literal characters and not Wildcards (as I reported in Post #1).

However, the help phrasing on this subject is misleading. There are a couple of descriptions of where * and ? cannot be used, thus implying that there are other situations in which these characters can be used. The help does not specify where they can be used. Experiements indicate that they cannot be used. Still open to corrections though.
Cheers
Ian

[Ike]

Is there a function out there to tell me if two Strings are identical, if
there are multiple wildcards involved, for example

$s =="A*B*C*";

evaluates to true for, say "ABERCROMBIE." Something that works for any
number and placement of wildcard characters like this? Thanks, Ike

[Alvaro G Vicario]

*** Ike wrote/escribió (Fri, 09 Jul 2004 13:03:05 GMT):

> Is there a function out there to tell me if two Strings are identical, if
> there are multiple wildcards involved, for example
>
> $s =="A*B*C*";
>
> evaluates to true for, say "ABERCROMBIE." Something that works for any
> number and placement of wildcard characters like this? Thanks, Ike

This is called "regular expressions". Check manual for preg_match(), ereg()
and eregi().

Of course, you need to write appropriate regular expressions (that's the
difficult part). In your example it could be something like this:

^A(.*)B(.*)c

Example not tested!


--
--
-- Álvaro G. Vicario - Burgos, Spain
--

[eclipsboi]

preg_match("/[ABC]+/", $s) // Matches all A's, B's, or C's

There may be a better way, as I am not as proficient in regexp as I
would like to be. But maybe this could get you going in the right
direction.

On Fri, 09 Jul 2004 13:03:05 GMT, "Ike" <rxv@hotmail.com> wrote:

>Is there a function out there to tell me if two Strings are identical, if
>there are multiple wildcards involved, for example
>
>$s =="A*B*C*";
>
>evaluates to true for, say "ABERCROMBIE." Something that works for any
>number and placement of wildcard characters like this? Thanks, Ike
>