Exclude Punctuation & Other Characters In Search Expression

[Jerry]

Hi,
I'm often pasting into the Everything search field a character string that includes characters that I don't want to be included in the actual search. For example quotes, dashes, parentheses and brackets, punctuation like ".,;!" and of course, invalid filename characters like ":?". It would be very convenient in these cases not to have to manually go through the string and remove these characters when I want a search just on the individual words in the string.

For example, I might paste in something like

Code: Select all

foo, bar: boo-goo? (one, two)

and what I want to do is a search just on the words alone:

Code: Select all

foo bar boo goo one two

So in these cases, it would be great if 1) Everything automatically excluded the ":" and "?" and any other invalid filename characters unconditionally; and 2) optionally, via a toggle, excluded any character from a custom specified list.

A toggle like this, along with the other various search options, could be a button on a toolbar so it's clear it was enabled or disabled. (I assume the feature of a toolbar for search options has been requested before.)

[raccoon]

In the current experimental version of Everything 1.5 Alpha, pressing the key combination CTRL+SHIFT+V (aka: shift-paste) will paste

Code: Select all

foo, bar: boo-goo? (one, two)

as

Code: Select all

foo  bar  boo goo   one  two

The only difference from your example is that non-text characters are converted into spaces and collapsed into a single space, but other real spaces are not collapsed along with.

@void might consider collapsing all non-text and space sequences into one space.

[harryray2]

Just tried tahat..didn';t seem to work. Is there an ini setting that needs changing?

[NotNull]

didn';t seem to work.

What happened?


This should work out of the box on Everything 1.5.
But you might have reconfigured the 'CTRL + SHIFT + V' keyboard shortcut for something else.
- Go to MEnu:Tools > Options > General > Keyboard,
- type punct in the Show commands containing: box
- select Search Edit | Paste Without Punctuation
- Check the Shortcuts for Search Edit | Paste Without Punctuation command configuration.

[Jerry]

The only difference from your example is that non-text characters are converted into spaces and collapsed into a single space, but other real spaces are not collapsed along with.

Oh, that should work fine for my purposes. The extra spaces don't matter -- unless things work differently in V1.5 Alpha.

[void]

@void might consider collapsing all non-text and space sequences into one space.

The next alpha update will do this.
Thanks for the suggestion.

[therube]

I'll only say that one want ? the spaces, for whatever reason?

Even though you've specifically performed an action that did something, you may not particularly remember doing so, so when you go back (some time after the fact) to the dialog you might see "why did i do that" & think to yourself, "why did i do that" ?

Where if it said "why.did...i...do....that[/c]", it might clue you in, "ah, i remember why i did that" .
Or it might help improve "readability".
(Had to use dots instead of spaces, cause the board compresses multiple space .)

(I'll often use [ extra ] spacing to improve readability/recognizability <hmm> in filenames.)


(And of course, depending where the data is coming from, like if from a web page, to a web browser, to Everything search, that can be [ pre ]filtered [& passed to Everything, using es: Protocol] with no need for any Paste.)

[void]

Everything 1.5.0.1327a will now remove the excess spaces.

Please let me know if this is too annoying and you would like to keep the extra spaces.

[harryray2]

@NotNull, I deleted it and added CTRL+SHIFT+V again and it worked, but it came up as CTRL+SHIFT+insert in the box. It now works with +V but it doesn't work with +insert