Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Searching for quoted text' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Searching for quoted text
Authored by: brycesutherland on May 20, '05 11:07:26AM

Not having a Mac handy at the moment, my first guess would be to escape the quotes, as in \"Foo Bar\".



[ Reply to This | # ]
Searching for quoted text
Authored by: googoo on May 20, '05 11:22:02AM

It works as advertised. I did a Spotlight search with <cmd><space>. When I enclosed the search filed in double quotes (""), it did a filename search. Otherwise it did a content search. I did not have to use a backslash before the double quote characters (although, I suppose that would be necessary for a command line search).

-Mark



[ Reply to This | # ]
Searching for quoted text
Authored by: PeteVerdon on May 22, '05 09:42:53AM

You misunderstand the question. Escaping the quotes was a possible solution for searching for a word that itself contains quotes. Say you have a lot of stories among your documents, and you want to search for someone saying hello, you might search for "hello" _including the quotes_. If using quotes turns it into a filename-only search, then that wouldn't work. To be able to do that you need a way of telling Spotlight that these quotes are not an instruction to do anything special. The standard Unix way of doing that is to precede them with slashes as Bryce suggested, but it's not clear if this works in Spotlight.

Pete



[ Reply to This | # ]
Searching for quoted text
Authored by: turboparrot on May 20, '05 11:26:39AM

Sorry, I don't have any success with this. Maybe it's just a bug.



[ Reply to This | # ]
Searching for quoted text
Authored by: jasont on May 20, '05 11:33:02AM
For me, escaping
 \"<Word_In_Quotes\"
works, but it doesn't return results until the end quote and matches against the first word only. Example, searching for the word foo in "foo bar test" seems to only match for foo and not bar test also using just
 bar test\" 
doesn't match for the end.

[ Reply to This | # ]
Searching for quoted text
Authored by: atshoom on May 20, '05 12:22:17PM

for me it doesn't work as filename contains:
as in other mac os x version.

i typed "doom" in spotlight, and ok i don't have anymore a content search in indexed text files but i get in result a file without the word doom in his filename but with the world doom in its ID3 tag !!!

so doesn't work exactly as advertised.



[ Reply to This | # ]