Narrowing a Search Using Truncation

Some of the List Search indexes require you to enter a text string. Since you may not always know the exact string, the List Search window recognizes special “wildcard” characters to take the place of words or letters you do not know. The two wildcard characters you can use are:

Asterisk ( * ). An asterisk represents any combination of one or more characters.
Percent sign ( % ). A percent sign represents any single variable character in a search string.

These wildcard characters let you match partial words or phrases against an entire string. Depending on the location of the “unknown” characters, you may place a wild card at the beginning, middle, or end of a search string. You can even place multiple wildcard characters at different points in the string. For example, to list all collections relating to audio materials, you can select the description search (which contains descriptions of all the collections in Horizon) and enter the truncated keyword: “*audio*”.

Enter an asterisk before and after the search terms since many of the terms may be preceded by other words. For example, if you were to enter “audio*”, Horizon would find only those records where the description contains the term “audio” first and that term may appear in the middle or at the end of the description.

As an example for using a percent sign, suppose you are searching for a borrower named Clark Jenson, but you do not know whether the last name ends in “sen” or “son.” You can use the percent sign to enter this search string and Horizon will find all last names of Jensen that end in either “sen” or “son.” The search value would be: “*jens%n*”

In this example, because the name field actually contains more than just the last name, you need to use asterisks as well to replace any additional information, such as first name and titles.

 


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