I would like to search my book to review my use of similes. So I create a search for “like” and I create one for “as” using the whole word feature. Each search is useful, but I would really like to be able to create (and save as a collection) a search where either “like” or “as” is found.
It has to be a whole word search to prevent my getting “was” or “masses” in the “as” search.
I would think a “whole word” and “any word” combination would give the result I want, but I cannot select both options simultaneously.
Try setting the search operator to “RegEx” and paste in the following query:
\b(like|as)\b
The \b symbol looks for a word boundary (spaces, punctuation, etc., so that wrapping a word in these is similar to using the Whole Word search type) and the stuff in the parenthesis is your word list. As with algebra, the stuff in parentheses is evaluated first, thus if any of those words are surrounded by word boundaries, it is thus not a part of another word, like Cassidy. If you wish to add other words, separate each word with a pipe “|” symbol.