Precedence rules
While an expression is read from left to right, some operators carry more weight than others. For example, AND operators take precedence over OR operators. To ensure that an OR operator is interpreted prior to an AND operator, you can use parentheses to enclose the OR operator:

(a OR b) AND c

Terms enclosed by parentheses are read first.

There must be at least one space between operators and words used in the expression.

When the search engine encounters nested parentheses, it starts with the innermost term:

(a AND (b OR c)) OR d

This expression means: Look for documents that contain b or c as well as a, or that contain d.

Prefix and infix notation
Search strings that use any operator other than evidence operators can be defined in prefix notation or infix notation.

Prefix notation specifies that the operator comes before the search string:

AND (a,b)

When prefix notation is used, precedence is handled explicitly within the expression. The following example means: "Look for documents that contain b and c first, then documents that contain a":

OR (a, AND (b,c))

Infix notation specifies that the operator is to be specified between each term within the expression. The following example means: "Look for documents that contain a and b or documents that contain c":

a AND b OR c

When infix notation is used, precedence is implicit in the expression. For example, the AND operator takes precedence over the OR operator.

Commas in expressions
If an expression includes two or more search terms within parentheses, a comma is required as a separator between each element. The following example means: Look for documents that contain any combination of a and b together. Note that in this example, angle brackets are used with the OR operator.

<OR> (a, b)

Delimiters in expressions
Angle brackets < >, double quotation marks " ", and backslashes \ are used to delimit various elements in a query expression.

Angle brackets for operators
Left and right angle brackets < > are reserved for designating operators and modifiers. They are optional for the AND, OR, and NOT operators, but required for all other operators. P>Double quotation marks in expressions
You use double quotation marks to search for a word that is otherwise reserved as an operator, such as AND, OR, and NOT.

Backslashes in expressions
To include a backslash \ in a search, insert two backslashes for each backslash character you want to search for:

C:\\CFUSION\\BIN

Wildcards
The following wildcard characters are available for searching Verity collections:

Searching for wildcards as literals
To search for a wildcard character in your collection, you need to escape the character with a backslash (\). For example:

To match a literal asterisk, you precede the * with two backslashes: "a\\*"

To match a question mark or other wildcard character: "Checkers\?"

Searching for special characters as literals
The following non-alphanumeric characters must be preceded by a backslash character (\) in a search string:

• comma (,)
• left and right parentheses ( )
• Double quotation mark (")
• backslash (\)
• at sign (@)
• left curly brace ({)
• left bracket ([)
• less than sign (<)
• backquote (`)

In addition to the backslash character, you can use paired backquotes (` `) to interpret special characters as literals. For example, to search for the wildcard string "a{b" you can surround the string with backquotes, as follows:

`a{b`

To search for a wildcard string that includes the literal backquote character (`) you must use two backquotes together and surround the whole string in backquotes:

`*n``t`

Note that you can use either paired backquotes or backslashes to escape special characters. There is no functional difference in the use of one or the other. For example, you can query for the term: <DDA> in the following ways:

\<DDA\> or `<DDA>`

Evidence operators
Evidence operators can be used to specify either a basic word search or an intelligent word search. A basic word search finds documents that contain only the word or words specified in the query. An intelligent word search expands the query terms to create an expanded word list so that the search returns documents that contain variations of the query terms.

Documents retrieved using evidence operators are not ranked by relevance unless you use the MANY modifier.

<STEM>believe

spam*

Proximity operators
Proximity operators specify the relative location of specific words in the document. Specified words must be in the same phrase, paragraph, or sentence for a document to be retrieved. In the case of NEAR and NEAR/N operators, retrieved documents are ranked by relevance based on the proximity of the specified words. Proximity operators can be nested; phrases or words can appear within SENTENCE or PARAGRAPH operators, and SENTENCE operators can appear within PARAGRAPH operators.

The following table describes each operator:

commute <NEAR/10> bicycle <NEAR/10>
train <NEAR/10>

mission oak
"mission oak"
mission <PHRASE> oak
<PARAGRAPH> (mission, oak)

jazz <SENTENCE> musician
<SENTENCE> (jazz, musician)

Relational operators

Relational operators search document fields that have been defined in the collection. Documents containing specified field values are returned. Documents retrieved using relational operators are not ranked by relevance, and you cannot use the MANY modifier with relational operators.

There are two types of relational operators to perform numeric and date comparisons. Text comparison operators match words and parts of words.

Numeric and date relational operators
The following operators are used for numeric and date comparisons.

Text comparison operators
The following operators are used for text comparisons.

SUBSTRING example
You can use the SUBSTRING operator to match a character string with data stored in a specified data source. In the following example, a data source called TEST1 contains the table YearPlaceText, which itself contains three columns: Year, Place, and Text. Year and Place make up the primary key. This is what the table looks like:

Table name: YearPlaceText
Year	Place	Text
1990	Utah	Text about Utah 1990
1990	Oregon	Text about Oregon 1990
1991	Utah	Text about Utah 1991
1991	Oregon	Text about Oregon 1991
1992	Utah	Text about Utah 1992

Excerpted from Verity search help, Copyright © Allaire Corporation (www.allaire.com).