Windows Explorer Search Specifics in Windows 7

[cboshdave]

I am continually frustrated with the searches in Windows 7. My latest issue is searching for "|10480|" in the files. Can someone explain why it returns files that contain only 10480? instead of the specified values? It seems to be treating them as special characters?? Not sure. I really need a more specific search though.

Dave

 

[mrjimphelps]

Did you select the special character (the vertical line before and after the number) from the symbol table? If so, make sure you are picking the same one that is in the document -- if you look in the Windows Character Map, there are several vertical line characters. If you search on a different vertical line character than the one that is in your document, the search will fail.

A better way to do this search might be to manually search for one occurrence of the string, highlight and copy the entire string, then paste that into the search window. In this way, as long as the same vertical line character is used every time throughout the document, you will find it.

Also, are you sure that there is a vertical line character both before and after every single occurrence of this string? If you aren't sure, then you would be better off searching for "10480", and then visually inspecting each one you find.

 

[cboshdave]

Good thoughts. Maybe it is a different character. But it still strange that when I enter the 10480 with pipes, it still finds files with the 10480 without pipes. That makes no sense to me. If I am searching a literal, I don't want a wildcard result. I can't sift thru hundreds of false positives. I am dealing with mass quantities of files here. I am trying to use a surgeon's knife and microsoft is providing a shotgun.

 

[Megahertz07]

I miss Win XP search so much...
What are you searching, files names or files that contains 10480?

 

[cboshdave]

I am searching the contents of the files. I have adjusted my indexing options to allow Windows to search the file types that I am interested in. So, it is working (kind of). Just trying to make it more precise.