Search help

**pedz** · January 9th, 2006, 09:07 PM

I want to search (this site) for soemthing like:

spotlight "regular expressions"

to find articles that have BOTH the word spotlight and the phrase "regular expressions". I can get anything close to this. A list of words seems to be "or" not "and". And the quotes do not seem to do anything at all.

Am I just SOL?

Thanks,

**symphonix** · January 9th, 2006, 10:08 PM

You're not wrong to wonder about regular expressions in Spotlight. for some reason, spotlights interface lags behind the search interfaces used, for example, in iTunes or iPhoto.

While I'm pretty sure there's no provision for regular or Boolean expressions in the spotlight search window, the underlying unix command "mdfind" (md stands for metadata) does have support for regular expressions in its queries but only on specific metadata elements. For this reason, I'm pretty sure that Spotlight will be much more powerful on the next major OS release.

**fryke** · January 10th, 2006, 05:11 AM

nono, he wants to search _this forum_ about spotlight and "regular expressions"...

**ScottW** · January 10th, 2006, 01:21 PM

You will need to click on "Advanced Search" then choose "Boolean" as your search type. For example, searching 'spotlight "regular expressions"' resulted in only this thread being found.