See also:
| Assisted and Expert Search Modes STAR's Indexing Rules and the Basic Index |
Certain words and characters are assigned special meanings in STAR, to provide convenient and explicit ways for you to formulate the logic of a search expression. We refer to these as "reserved strings," and a list of these follows in the chart below.
To override the system meanings associated with these strings in your expert searches, you can instruct STAR to treat the string "literally" — as a search term or as part of a search term — using double-quote marks around the search term, e.g.:
| to search on OR as the state of Oregon: CA OR NY OR "OR" |
| to search on a term with an embedded AND: JOHNSON AND JOHNSON" |
In FIELDS-searchable searches of search terms that include a reserved punctuation character, you can use the apostrophe before the character. For example, if a controlled vocabulary included a demographic subject term such as 65+, you could enter either of these two search terms: "65+" (or) 65'+
In assisted search mode, reserved strings are handled automatically when the search is constructed for execution by STAR.
| Reserved Strings | ||
| Reserved | Explanation |
|
| String | Equivalent | |
| ALL | special field for all searchable fields | |
| R | search field for the STAR record number | |
| Sn | Search Number, where 'n' is any number from 1 through 65535 (e.g., S1 is reserved but S01 is not reserved) | |
| * | multi-character wildcard | |
| ? | single-character wildcard | |
| AND | ^ | AND operator |
| NOT | ~ | NOT operator |
| OR | \ or ; | OR operator |
| THRU | : | range operator |
| EQ | = | equal-to operator |
| GE | >= | greater-than-or-equal-to operator |
| GT | > | greater-than operator |
| LE | <= | less-than-or-equal-to operator |
| LT | < | less-than operator |
| NE | ~= (or) =~ (or) <> |
not-equal-to operator |
| AJD | + | adjacent to (in the specified order) |
| W/R | :R: | within the same record (same as AND) |
| W/F | :F: | within the same field |
| W/0 | :: | within zero words |
| NEAR | :N: | within 5 words (same as W/5) |
| W/n | :n: | within 'n' words (where 'n' is a number) |
| W/P | :P: | within the same paragraph |
| W/O | :O: | within the same occurrence |
| W/S | :S: | within the same sentence or subfield |
| ( ) | parentheses used around search terms to make explicit the order of operations that are to be performed | |
| [x,y] | square brackets used to specify variant word forms ('x,y') and lists (with or without a comma) | |
| ' | apostrophe used to indicate that the punctuation character that follows is to be taken literally | |
| / | used to indicate that a search field follows; if the term that follows is not a search field, STAR assumes that it and the slash are part of the search term | |
| ! | used to search for null subfields | |
| " " | used to represent "null" values (i.e., fields without data) | |
| " " | used to enclose literal text, within which reserved words and punctuation characters other than * and ? are taken literally | |