# ZQuery Help For Formulating Queries

This search system supports following searches:

- Simple words
- Regular expressions
- Phrases
- Exclude expression

## Simple words:

Type in one or more words you want to find in document.

Example:

- house matches house
- house farm finds documents which has the words house and farm

## Regular expressions:

Following regular expressions are supported.

- house matches house
- . matches any character
- [ad] matches a or d
- [abc] matches a, b or c
- [a-n] matches any character from a to n
- [a-do-z] matches any character from a to d and o to z
- x* matches x zero or more times
- x+ matches x one or more times
- x? matches x once or twice

Example:

- house matches house but not inhouse or houser
- h.use matches hause, hbuse, hcuse ...
- h[au]use matches hause, huuse
- h[ade]use matches hause, hduse, heuse
- h[x-z]use matches hxuse, hyuse, hzuse
- ha*use matches huse, hause, haause, haaause ...
- ha+use matches hause, haause, haaause, haaaause ...
- ha?use matches hause, haause

The expression "a*" means a, aa, aaa ... and not any word beginning with "a" like a, aa, ab, ac ... aba etc. If you want to find all expressions starting with an "a", you should type in "a.*". This also applies to the expression "a.+" which means find any expression starting with an "a" and is at least two characters long.

## Phrases enclosed in quotes:

Phrases should be enclosed in quotes.

Example:

- "dark house" matches "dark house"

## Exclude words or phrases with "-":

Words or phrases can be excluded by prepending a "-".

Example:

- house -dark finds documents which contains "house" but not "dark".

## You can use any combination of examples described above:

Example:

- house barn cow
- "farm house"
- "farm house" -cow
- farm house -"white cow"
- "farm house" -"white cow"
- farm.* -white -cow

This search system is based on a Z39.50 server. The current setting for query is to:

- Search keywords in "bib-1 Any", that is 1016,4,1005,62 of a document. It means search any(1016) field which contains title(4), author(1005) and abstract(62) according to bib1.att. The soif.flt does following SOIF to bib-1 mapping: title to title, author to author and description to abstract.
- Match on word boundary
- Match case insensitive
- Sort hits by internal relevance ranking value (better hits first)

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