Okay… “Find” has decided it no longer recognizes asterisks, either * or ***.
Finds almost anything else. Not asterisks. I use asterisks to mark italics when importing from text.
It used to work. All of a sudden it doesn’t.
Hi Marilynx. Are you working with Scrivener 1 or Scrivener 3?
And, has your PC or Scrivener received any updates since the last time you used Find to search for asterisks? I’d like to check that in case an update has been a factor.
If you access the Interactive Tutorial and add some asterisks to its text, will Find locate them? You can access the Tutorial from Scrivener’s Help menu.
Whenever one of my projects starts behaving oddly, I’ll test the Tutorial to see if it’s an issue with my project corrupting or something that affects more than one project.
Knowing that information could help us narrow down the cause of Find’s behavior.
Scriv 3.
No updates to either Scrivener or the PC – it was working just fine on Sunday, and then stopped working last night. ANd ‘FInd’ finds other things just fine. It’s weird.
If you use File > Save and Rebuild Search Indexes, does that allow Find to locate the asterisks?
You might also check the Project Search box and tell it to “Reset Search Options” just in case some lingering search there is interfering with Find’s behavior.
I wouldn’t expect that to be the case, but I’ve also seen my projects deliver unexpected results when I wasn’t diligent about cleaning out previous searches.
Save & Rebuild Search Indexes does not help.
But Project Search can find the asterisks.
Wild guess.
Did you grab an asterisk from the editor to feed the find function?
Perhaps you grabbed an invisible character at the same time?
No. I typed it into the search.
Restarted Scrivener?
Rebooted your computer?
Is Find set for “contain” + ignore case ?
I close Scrivener every night when I put the computer to sleep.
Computer was rebooted yesterday.
Find Options are set to ignore case.
But: this time, I ran the Project Find and located all asterisks. I closed that. THen I saved and closed the file.
THIS time, when I tried the “Find,” it worked.
I do not understand.
I have nothing to do with this, I swear.
I think there is a Murphy Gremlin in the house…
In Project Search, the asterisk is a wildcard character for most search operators that will match any character, so e.g. searching * in Title will return all documents that have been given title (as opposed to being empty with only the placeholder text showing). To search for the asterisk character itself, the best option is to use RegEx and search for \*, which says to treat the asterisk as a literal character to match.
In the document Find, you can use the same search term for a RegEx search, or search for * using the “Contains” setting. The other search options (Starts With, etc.) don’t seem to work with the asterisk as they should, but Contains ought to do it. So perhaps at some point that dropdown got changed in your dialogue accidentally and caused the problem.