Tips for searching for special characters in Intella

[Chris Rogers]

Sometimes you need to search for a phrase in Intella, and only want an exact match for that phrase. If that phrase contained a special character, you may get more results than you intended.

The following characters have special meaning in the query syntax and may cause an error message if not used in accordance to the syntax rules:

+ - && || ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ? : / \

A good example would be the phrase "work-around". Normally if you searched for this term using the Keyword Search function, you would get results for work-around, but you would also get hits for the words work and around even if you use quotations to force a phrase search. 

Luckily, Intella has a built-in solution for searching for that exact phrase. Content Analysis is what we want to use in this instance. You can see here that when we do a keyword search for "work-around" we get hits for all the words in the phrase: 

 

The reason for this is these special characters are not included when Intella is looking for words in your data. You can easily check what Intella found in each item by going to the Words tab. You will see here that the "-" is not present in the found text. 

 

Now we're going to use Content Analysis to cull down to only the exact phrase we'd like to find. The Regular Expression for this is pretty simple. We just want to input our phrase into ( ) in a new Content Analysis expression. 

Now, after running that across our data we can see that only the phrase we want to appear shows up. Also, with Content Analysis, results are highlighted instead of blue like search hits. 

RegEx is a great way to accomplish searching for specific things in your data, but it is more time consuming than the keyword search function so knowing how both perform and when to use them will only improve your investigations. 

For the RegEx syntax supported by Intella, please follow this link: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/java.base/java/util/regex/Pattern.html

More information on this topic can be found here: https://www.vound-software.com/docs/intella/2.6.1/#_tokenization_and_special_characters