Operators inside quotation marks

[Shirish.Lele]

Greetings!

This is my very first post and I am a user of Intella Pro 2.7.1. So please guide me if this is not where I should be putting such queries. I have quite a few and will try not to club everything into one.

The first one is about operators.

I was executing a search for a file name that had spaces. So I enclosed the whole name in double quotes.

However, when I write

"Alpha Bravo and Charlie-Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel India_Jjuliette_15.30.1820.pdf"

I get 7 results whereas, if I write

 

"Alpha Bravo AND Charlie-Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel India_Jjulie_15.30.1820.pdf"

I get zero results.

 

While I understand that AND is an operator, I thought it would behave differently when put inside double quotes.

Besides, I do not think the documentation says anywhere that the operators are case sensitive. It would probably be better to get used to && and II.

 

-SL

 

 

 

[Jacques B]

That's an interesting observation. My understanding is that boolean operators are case sensitive. From your experience, it appears that Intella's query parsing is treating that AND as a boolean operator despite being in quotes.

I did some testing where I have 4 documents with the string "this is to certify". If I search for "this is to certify", I get all four. If I search for "this is AND to certifiy", I get the same four. If I search for "this is NOT to certify", I don't get any hits. If I search for "this is NOT my certify", I get the same four documents.

So it looks like it's searching for a string that starts with "this is", that is NOT followed by "my", but that is then followed by "certify". Applying that logic to the AND boolean operator, the search "this is AND to certify" is the same as "this is to certify" because in the first instance, we are saying the third word must be "to". That seems pointless. But that means you can do something like this:

"this is AND (to OR from) certify"

That query returns the same four documents. But if there had been a string "this is from certify" in a document, that would have also been returned. So the lesson there is don't capitalize a word unless you want to use a boolean operator in which case you must capitalize.

You could use this if you wanted to search for a string, but want to exclude certain words at a particular placement to eliminate false positives. A completely fictitious and unlikely example would be you want to search for either "i want to buy some drugs" or "i want to sell some drugs". You could do that in a few different ways:

"i want to buy some drugs" OR "i want to sell some drugs"

but you could also do (if I understand this correctly)

"i want to AND (buy OR sell) some drugs"

The advantage of a more elaborate query is it results in a single cluster vs multple queries and then looking for the cluster denoting intersecting hits. Rather than looking at 5 or 6 clusters and looking for the right intersecting one, using more complexe queries (including keywords rather than setting the scope of a search via the check boxes) reduces the number of clusters, and makes it easier to see the intersecting hits you are after.

Getting back to your query, the AND is treated as a boolean, not as a string in that search. So it's the same as searching for "Alpha Bravo Charlie-Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel India_Jjulie_15.30.1820.pdf" (the AND is not part of the search string), hence why you are not finding any documents with this file name.

[Jacques B]

Talk about a coincidence. I have a case where the investigator requested a keyword list with variations such as

• "slap you" and "slap u"
• "bite you" and "bite u"

and other similar ones. Instead of putting that on two separate lines in the keywords text file, I used what I learned ih answering your question and did this instead:

• "slap AND (you OR u)"
• "bite AND (you OR u)"

In looking at that, I could have done something like this:

"(slap OR bite) AND (you OR u)" and catch both of the above in a single query.

[Shirish.Lele]

Thanks. I have used Nuix in the past and went by the assumption that the quotation marks will be respected.

Your experimentation has given me a new insight into this.

I would never have thought of using boolean operators inside quotation marks. Use of

"slap AND (you OR u)"

is indeed interesting. Will try this out.

Thanks again

[Shirish.Lele]

Trying to understand significance of spaces and parenthesis inside search strings surrounded by quotes.

Documented my problem and observations in a document.

Appreciate some insight or pointer to some documentation that helps with this.

 

Questions about Search Syntaxt.pdf

Edited August 19 by Shirish.Lele
The name of the file might mislead people

[Jacques B]

I think the parenthesis is part of the issue, as it's a special character (see https://www.vound-software.com/docs/connect/2.7.1/Intella Connect Reviewer Manual.html#_tokenization_and_special_characters). You need to escape those to be treated as a literal character. They also explain "tokenization", where text is divided into searchable parts. That likely impacts your examples.

This previous thread may help: 

 

And here is a posting I did a while back about an issue with searching for URLs which seems to mirror the issue you highlighted when searching for "Info Request (Nov 5)" as well as your follow up example where you needed to include gratuitous spaces (ignore my misspelling in my original post).

 

The workaround seems to be to avoid the special characters where possible, and instead break it into two or more substrings and look for intersecting (or make it a Requred).

 

[Shirish.Lele]

Thanks.

I think I was expecting a bit too much from the double quotes. I thought the double quotes would also remove special meaning of the characters enclosed.

I think I will spend some time to figure out how to search in the community to get meaningful results before posting.

For now, I am just replacing all the special characters with empty spaces to get moving.

Thanks again

[Jacques B]

Glad to help. And no worries about searching posts. In the case of my gratuitous spaces, I misspelled gratuitious in my title which would affect your ability to search for that :).