Ryosuke839/UnicodePad

Using search operators when searching for a character

Opened this issue · 4 comments

I was looking for the character for the math pi π (Greek Small Letter Pi, U+03C0, math constant. I was not sure if the greek letter was the one I wanted or if there was a specific one for math, like with Alef that has the ℵ Alef Symbol U+2135 and the א Hebrew Letter Alef U+05D0)

When searching for “pi” in the “find” tab, I was getting all the caPItal letters.
I tried adding double quotes “"” (Quotation Mark U+0022), but they were automatically removed.
Then I tried searching for “pi math” but I was getting all the MATHematical caPItals (and π is not in it because it does not belong to the mathematical set).
I tried to remove capitals from the search with “pi -capital” but there was no results.
“+pi” got the same thing than without the “+”.
I had to search for it in my browser, it defeats the use of UnicodePad.

Is there a way to filter results with operators like in a search engine?
If yes, how?
If no, could some be added?

This is something I've struggled with myself. I have some ideas for improvements:

If one of the words have made a match, any other word should not make the same match.

Meaning that if you search for latin capital letter t, since it now matches "latin" and "letter", those "t" are now occupied and it will need to find another "t" in the name instead. So it'll find "Latin capital letter t" but not "Latin capital letter a", but it will find "Latin capital letter a with acute". It should still massively improve the search.

Use quotes for exact match

The search has actually recently changed and your searches must be exact matches. This means you can no longer search for combining below to find such as "combining acute accent below", "combining dot below". This has made the search worse in some aspects. It would be better if you had to use quotes for exact matches, so exact matches is optional. "latin capital letter t" should only find those with this exact match.

Exclude words

Like you suggested, someone should be able to search for t -latin -letter and find all symbols having "t" somewhere and not have "latin" or "letter" be part of the name.

Match whole words only

I have no idea how one would go about formatting this in a search box. Best I can think of is writing " t ", and it should treat all names as if they start and end with a space, so it'll find all names having "t" surrounded by spaces or the start/end of the name. It will be like a whole word match then.

FWIW

  • <space>pi works (satisfactorly)
  • <space>pi<space> finds a whole word if mid sentence
  • 3.14 should've worked but decimal point gets strip-ed out

need to accept various symbols in search input

Thanks, so you can enclose with to only match the whole word 👍. That is what I was trying to do with the double quotes like in a search engine.

As someone has found, searching for pi does not return U+03C0 "GREEK SMALL LETTER PI" because there is no space after "LETTER PI".
Removing the trailing space returns it, but also all the PI