Search does not find non-word strings

What I did:
Find in a note doesn’t seem to work as expected. E.g. I tried to search for “ – ” or “%%” and I found nothing even though I know these strings were used in some of the notes.

What happened:
Found nothing.

What I expected:
Should have found the notes with non-word strings.

Things that might be helpful to know (Agenda version, OS and model, etc):
Agenda 2.1.1, macOS 10.13.3, MacBook Pro 13-inch

Im betting that - and % are going to be illegal in searchng since databases use those reserved characters. Try using something other than - and % for searches. You probably shouldn’t use operators (+ - * /) or the logicals (&, && ||) either.

Then again I could be wrong !

When we normalise the text for indexing these are most likely stripped out, we’ll have a look if we do this too strict or will keep the current behaviour to avoid false positives.

Ah, I see. Let me just explain my use cases:

I’ve been using %% as a FIXME reminder for years – it is quick, visible, easily searched for. I’d suggest that you automatically index all non-white space characters as words and leave it up to the users as to what they want to search for.

Regarding the “ – ” search: I like to use correct typography for each language I use, however as I mostly write in Czech, I am used to enter an en-dash surrounded by spaces. In English, the same meaning is conveyed by an em-dash—like this—and without surrounding spaces. Therefore whenever I finish an English text, I search for instances where I accidentally used “ – ” and replace them with “—”. One possible solution might be that you allow a non-indexed search (or search and replace) of the current note.

Thanks for the follow up, makes a lot of sense. We are planning to improve the full text search indexing as it works very poorly with some languages, especially asian ones. We’ll keep the above in mind when we rework the tokenisation.

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Update: In version 2.3 for Mac and the latest iOS version indexing of non-latin language should be much improved.

Hi, thanks for the info, however the current version at the Mac AppStore
is 2.2.1. When will you release 2.3?

We hope by the end of the week, it’s already available in beta though: https://agenda.community/t/now-available-2-3-1-beta/