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About Special Characters

3DSearch interprets most non-alphanumeric characters as separators or as operators reserved for the Business Analytics Server User Query Language (UQL).

If a special character is part of the string you are searching, you can take it into account in the query by:

• Preceding it with a backslash \ to disable the UQL interpretation. For example, to search for test= enter test\=.
• Enclosing the string with double quotes “”. For example, to search for: (test) enter “(test)”, to search for abc\def enter “abc\def”…

Reserved Characters

3DSearch interprets several special characters as User Query Language operators in your queries. Therefore, they are not treated as characters to search for.

• Back slash \ used to escape reserved characters.
• Parentheses ( or ) reserved for sub-expressions. See also Search with logical expressions.
• Double Quote " reserved for Search by exact phrase.
• Colon : reserved for search with predefined queries. For example, prd:searchstring to search for products. For more information, see Searching with Predefined Queries.
• Plus sign + reserved for Search by exact word.
• Minus sign - reserved for Search with excluded words.
• Square Brackets [ or ]
• Curly Brackets { or }
• Equal Sign =
• Less than or greater than < or >
• Line feed \n, carriage return \r, tab \t
• Comma ,
• forward slash /

Punctuation Marks and Symbols Treated as Separators

For the 3DSwym service and for 3D Space, 3DSearch does not take punctuation marks and symbols into account, and treats them as separators only. For example, 3DSearch interprets Mypart.0123 as Mypart 0123 by default.

Punctuation marks treated as separators:

• Semicolon ;
• Dot .
• Comma ,
• Forward slash /
• Backward slash \
• Pipe |
• At @
• Exclamation mark !
• Percent %
• Hash #
• Caret ^
• Tilde ~
• Dollar sign $
• Single quote '
• Ampersand &
• Underscore _

Search with wildcard

Use * as a wildcard. For example, drill* returns: drill, drilled, drilling, drill-rivet, etc.

Note: Even if the query does not contain any wildcard character, the search mechanism uses “implicit wildcarding” automatically. While 3DSearch searches the indexed content with the strict user input, it also runs this implicit wildcarding in parallel to broaden the search criteria for predefined properties, like Title, Name, and a few others.

Important: You cannot use wildcards with double-byte characters.