Case sensitive searches

z8080
I needed to do a case-sensitive search (using Advanced Search) today, and noticed there's no way of specifying that you want a case-sensitive or a "whole words only" search. Perhaps something to implement in a future version? Thanks!
  • erazlogo
    If you do an "is" (as opposed to "contains") search you'll get case-sensitive results. All advanced searches are phrase searches I think.
  • z8080
    Yes but I needed an "Attachment content" - "contains" type of search...
  • erazlogo
    Right. This should be easy to add I think since it already works for "is" searches.
  • hplieninger
    edited November 30, 2012
    I would like to highlight again, that it would be extremely helpful to have additional features in the advanced search, like "whole words only" or "case sensitive".

    @erazlogo: The "is" search is only appropriate for a subset of cases because it will find, for example, this thread using the search term "Case sensitive searches" but not if you would use just "Case".
  • charlespetersen
    It seems you can't use "is" to search Notes, and so can't search notes for whole words only. Or am I missing something?
  • anaselli
    I currently have 23,766 items in my Zotero library, and I'm attempting to search all the titles for the word "As" (upper-case "A") so that I can change them to "as" (lower-case "a"). (The most recent Chicago Style of Manual says to list "as" in lower-case for Headline Style.)

    When I type the word "As" in the advanced "is" search, nothing shows up. Apparently, the "is" search is for the entire title, not a part of the title. No?
  • adamsmith
    correct, there is no way to force case-sensitive searches for titles at the moment.
  • AndySymons
    edited October 13, 2020
    I agree on the need to be able to specify case-sensitive and whole-word searches separately, whether it is an "is" search or not. I would also like a simple way to check whether a field is numeric (for Edition) or contains any one of a list of values (e.g. language codes). At present I have to test Edition for each letter of the alphabet and punctuation, and for Language I have to test (confusingly) whether is is all of 'is not' each code (with upper case and lower case examples of each)
  • grahamperrin
    edited 4 days ago
    … no way to force case-sensitive searches for titles at the moment.
    Where case-sensitive is essential to finding something – say, a single item in the midst of thousands – a separate application may be used.

    In the screenshot below, I quit Zotero – to release the lock on the database – then used DB Browser for SQLite to open the database read-only.

    Finding two items in the midst of six:

    https://s3.amazonaws.com/zotero.org/images/forums/u9523/qefayhjfs5xnu90fa8qh.png
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