Aid4Mail provides proximity searching within a sentence through the ~* character wildcard and the <.> word wildcard.

Matching characters within a sentence

The ~* character wildcard will match zero or more characters, including white space characters, as long as the search term is found within a single sentence. In other words, as long as no period (full stop) or tab character has been encountered.

For example, searching for jim~*sand will find both of these sentences:

1. Jim played in the sand.

2. Jimmy was sinking in quicksand.

It will not find the following because the search term spans more than one sentence in both cases:

3. Jim played all day. He had the most fun in the sand.

4. Jimmy didn’t read the sign. He was sinking in quicksand.

Matching words within a sentence

The <.> word wildcard will match zero or more whole words, rather than individual characters, within a single sentence. This gives slightly different results. Searching for jim<.>sand will find:

1. Jim played in the sand.

However it will not find:

2. Jimmy was sinking in quicksand.

3. Jim played all day. He had the most fun in the sand.

4.Jimmy didn’t read the sign. He was sinking in quicksand.

Sentence 2 will not be found because the my at the end of Jimmy, and the quick at the beginning of quicksand, are not whole words and so are not matched by the <.> wildcard.

Sentences 3 and 4 will not be found because the search term spans more than one sentence in both cases.

Matching both characters and words within a sentence

In order to find sentence 2 in the examples above using the <.> word wildcard, you could add additional character wildcards to match the partial words.

For example, the * character wildcard matches zero or more characters within the same word. Adding a * character wildcard at the end of jim would match the my at the end of Jimmy. Adding another * character wildcard before sand would match the quick at the start of quicksand. The <.> wildcard would continue to match the intermediate words between Jimmy and quicksand. The search term would then become jim*<.>*sand and would produce identical results to jim~*sand, both finding sentence 2.

Table cells are treated as sentences

When searching text in tables, Aid4Mail treats table cells as if they were sentences and rows as paragraphs.

If you experience any issues, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

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