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Documentation for Agora Rules Search


If you are unfamiliar with the Categorized Rule Lists, you may wish to check those out as well.

Do not use wildcards in the text boxes, as wildcards are currently not supported. If you enter an asterisk, it will search for an asterisk.

Do not use boolean operators in the text boxes. Use the pull-down menus of boolean operators instead. Boolean operators are evaluated top-down. In other words, a search for A OR B AND C will be interpreted as (A OR B) AND C. If a text box is empty, the boolean operator immediately above it is ignored.

Multiple words within a single text box are automatically treated as a phrase. Do not use quotes or parentheses (or any other punctuation) to indicate a phrase. Also, the search will not find a phrase if there is punctuation between words in a phrase, unless the punctuation was entered as part of a search.

Leading and trailing spaces are stripped, unless you are entering a regular expression. (If you don't know what a regular expression is, don't worry about it.)

I reserve the right to log searches. Although this is not being done at the time I write this, it may be done in the future. This would be done for evaluative purposes--if I see that no one is using a certain option, I might choose to eliminate that option.

I am happy to hear of any suggestions, complaints, etc., but I cannot promise how quickly I will be able to act on them.

If you do not want to read about the various options below each text box, you can probably do OK by leaving them at the default settings, and stopping here.

Back to search page


Options

Please note that each set of options applies only to the text box it is associated with. So if you are entering text in all three boxes, and want all three to be case-sensitive, you will need to check the "Case-sensitive: Yes" option on each one.

Case-sensitive
Self-explanatory.

Perl regular expression
If you don't know what a perl regular expression is, leave this checked "No" (and ignore the rest of this paragraph; or, if you'd like to try to puzzle them out, take a look at the Perl regular expressions section of the Perl man pages). For those of you who can formulate regular expressions, note that using this option makes the "Expand whitespace" and "Whole word(s)" options meaningless--you must code them directly into the regular expression yourself, if you desire them. (I use (\s|\n|\r)+ to expand whitespace, and \b before and after the rest of the regular expression for whole word(s).) In searching Rules, you should know that each Rule is concatenated into a single string, although newlines are retained. The "s" option (treat string as single line) is used in matching. If the "Rule text only" option is on, blank lines are removed from the Rule text. Keep in mind that lines of Rule text begin with (at least) six spaces, and these are retained in matching. Be careful not to enter leading and/or trailing spaces unless you mean to; they are not stripped from regular expressions.

Expand whitespace
This option, if on, will check for multiple spaces and/or line breaks between words in a phrase. Highly recommended. In fact, I don't know why you wouldn't want to use this, but you can turn it off if you want to.

Whole word(s)
This option, when on, searches only for the whole words as listed. If off, it allows alphanumeric charaters before the beginning of the search term, and after the end. Note that it does not allow extra characters within the phrase, if more than one word has been entered. So if this option was off, a search for "vote collector" would find "vote collectors" but not "votes collector". Warning: this option is intended to be used when the first and last characters of the text are alphanumeric. If they are not, this option may not work as would be expected.

Rule text only
When on, this option searches only the text of the Rules for the terms. If off, it searches the entire Rule record (i.e., everything included with the Rule as it appears in the Full Logical Ruleset).


Hits since April 13, 1998: 1075
Most recent modification: Wednesday, 05-Apr-2000 23:45:51 CDT
Charles E. Carroll YEXSTIUDQAOG@spammotel.com
See http://www.spammotel.com/ for information about the above address.