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.