Finer discriminations among search keys

[Bryce]

Hi again Jason, hopefully you don't get tired of me checking in with my monthly question.

I am wondering if there is an option, or maybe just a different way of inputting them, to make search keys discriminate more finely among strings in various fields. For example, here are two issues I've run into.

1. I have a Person entry for Kit Fine, and originally the search keys were "Fine" and "Kit Fine." But then I started noticing that the end of words like "define," just the "fine" part, was turned into a hyperlink to Fine's person entry. I removed the "Fine" search key and it got rid of the problem, but now obviously I don't get a link to the person entry when I write something like, "According to Fine's argument, blah blah blah..."

2. I have a Term entry for de re modality. One of my search keys is "de re." This search key does NOT match strings like "define reality," but it DOES match strings like "ode reality," "de reality," and so on. I guess this has something to do with the different ways in which the first and second words of a search key match to different strings, but I'm not sure. You'd want it to only match the exact string "de re", if possible.

Anyway, hopefully these questions make sense. I use Hypernomicon basically every day and think it's really fantastic, and I'm very grateful to you for all the work you put into it.

[Jason Winning]

Hi Bryce,

No problem, it is always a pleasure to interact with users of Hypernomicon, and I am gratified to hear that you are benefitting from it!

You can actually begin a search key with an up-caret character (^) to indicate that it should only match the start of a word. The person record for Kit Fine in my database (our research seems to overlap a lot!) has, for this reason, "^Fine; Kit Fine" in the search keys field. Then it will match "Fine" but not "define". Similarly, you can end a search key with a dollar sign ($) character to indicate that it should only match the end of a word. So you could also set the search key field to "^Fine$; Kit Fine" to avoid matching a word like 'finesse' or 'finegrained'.

I don't think this fact is indicated in the video or anywhere in the UI so (note to self for future enhancement) it would probably be good to have it show that information when you hover the mouse over any Search Keys field; I am open to other suggestions.

A couple more examples of how I use this feature: I have a term record for "Action", with the Search Keys field set to "^act$; ^acts$; ^acting$; ^action; ^acted$"

I also have a term record for "Object", with the Search Keys field set to "object$; objects$; individual; ^thing"

Best,
Jason