Boolean Search Problem

rooots
Hi all,

I'm having problems with simple boolean searches for "Attachment Content" - "contains". For example, I want to find all attachments which contain both "carbon" and "oxide", but not necessarily as one phrase.
However, searching for "carbon AND oxide" (of course without "") won't yield any results no matter if I select 'phrase' or one of the 'regexp' options. Roughly two dozens of indexed PDFs contain both words, and both can be found by searching within the PDFs with a handful of PDF readers.

Am I missing something?!

Cheers,
r.
  • dstillman
    Do you mean that you're searching for the literal phrase "carbon AND oxide"? That won't work. You can use boolean logic by using separate search conditions, in either ALL or ANY mode, and you can chain saved searches (from the Collection condition) to use more complicated boolean logic.
  • rooots
    No, I'm searching for PDF attachments that contain both "carbon" and "oxide". Neither search strings "carbon oxide" nor "carbon AND oxide" (again, typed without quotation marks) yield any results for any of the search string options (phrase, regexp). Interestingly, one of the PDF even has both search words in the file name, but Zotero won't find it.
  • adamsmith
    right, what you want to do is

    Match all

    attachment content -- contains -- carbon
    attachment content -- contains -- oxide


  • rooots
    Thanks, that does work indeed, but shouldn't this be exactly what the AND operator is for?!
  • adamsmith
    The AND operator doesn't exist in Zotero. It's not a universal operator.
  • rooots
    Oh, then I obviously misunderstood the documentation for Zotero advanced search, where the operators are - obviously - only used to illustrate the procedure.

    Thanks!
    r.

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