Are there charaters that cannot be used in an archive search?

[Gerald_2]

Recently I was trying to search an Archive for a message for a search string that contained two dashes. The string I was searching for was this-is-a-test.  I was using the default Search page and searching the content. Anyway, this search always fails. The only way I could get the search to work was to use the advanced search site(http://vaultsite/enterprisevault/search.asp?advanced), set the filter on content to contains all near and use the string "this is a test" . This search works.

So the question is are there certain characters that you cannot use in a search? If so, what are those?

Thanks,

Gerald

[Paul_Grimshaw · Accepted solution]

So what you need to be aware of is the special characters that Alta Vista has reserved. AVS reserves some characters for it's search syntax and in that context they have special meaning. The reserved characters include:

+, -, !, &, |, :, (, ), ", $, *

The behavior of the $ character is a wild card that matches exactly one character.

So for example, abc$ would match the word 'abcd' but not 'abc'.

In addition to the above characters, the following strings are reserved in
the search syntax:

AND, OR, NOT, BEFORE, AFTER, WITHIN, ATLEAST