Report:Engineering Village/Search Syntax/Allowed Operators/Truncation or Wildcard Operators
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Truncation or Wildcard Operators
Engineering Village supports the following truncation operators:
- The asterisk * represents unlimited truncation, and both internal and right truncation is supported by the system according to the help file. The search engine can support unlimited truncation with a stem as short as one letter.
- The question mark ? represents a single character wildcard, and is supported at the beginning, middle, or end of any term.
- Engineering Village enables stemming for all search terms, unless the “autostemming off” checkbox is selected from whichever search form the search is conducted from. On the Easy Search form, autostemming is automatically applied unless the phrase is surrounded by quotes or braces {}, indicating the query is a [phrase search].
Editor's Note:Although not specifically stated by the help file, it appears that unlimited left truncation is also supported by the system. For example, the term *aromatic returned hits related to both nitroaromatic and chloroaromatic compounds; however, the term also returned all hits with just the keyword “aromatic” in them, so it may not be exclusive enough for all searchers needs. The search *aromatic NOT aromatic was able to correct this issue by excluding all hits without prefixes.
It is especially notable that the service does not mandate stems of a certain length before unlimited truncation is supported. For example, the search o* ran to completion, at over 24 million hits.
Finally, it appears that multiple question marks can be used together, but the limit appears to be 2 adjacent question marks. The search PR??? did not run to completion.
