House not Household

Hey, I must confess: In all the years I’ve been using Scrivener, I’ve never really understood the search function.

In DevonThink when I want to find house, but not household, I search for “house”.

Does anyone know how to do this with Scrivener?

Thank you :slight_smile:

Choose the Whole Word option from the Search Options dropdown menu. (The disclosure triangle at the left of the Project Search bar will get you there.)

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Thank you kewms. I’m afraid this is the answer/solution of an English speaking person :slight_smile:

Other languages have compound words like gardenparty or rosegardenstairs.

So if I choose „Whole Word“ and search for „house“ and „garden“
“Household” is not found (as desired) but neither „gardenparty“.

In other apps you can search for „house“ (Quotation marks = „Whole Word“) and garden (finds every word that contains garden)

Is this really not possible with Scrivener?

English has compound words, too. :grinning:

For this kind of combined search, probably the most flexible choice is our RegEx search, see Section 11.7 in the (Mac) Scrivener manual.

I am confused… why not just use this setting ?

Because this setting finds “wonderful” when I only want to find wonder

Isn’t this sentence self-contradicting ?


I dont think so. I would like to find only house (one word) and all words with garden (compound)

The issue is that the OP would like to find a whole word in one case (“house,” but not “household”) but not another (both “garden” and “gardenparty”).

I see. I guess then the search would have to be able to handle some function the like of “garden*”…
→ word + *

exactly kewms. I looked up section 11.7. You want me to learn a syntax to do a simple search?

Yeah, the OP failed to mention at the outset they were tying to do a boolean search. So, giving the precise answer to their initial question does not solve their problem. RegEx does sound like the way.

So there is no easy way with quotes or asterisks like in Devonthink?

I am reading the Manual’s coverage of the search function the same way you are. So, no.

But is there some important reason you need to search for these two disparate things in a single search? If you don’t want to mess with RegEx, just perform two searches. That would make sense on the assumption you are hunting up both because there is a change to be made to both.

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Yes, and perhaps create a collection.
Surely that ain’t an everyday thing anyways…

Or ask for the * search function on the wishlist. That would make sense. I guess one day I might need it too.

Thanks for your help :slight_smile: What do you mean by just perform two searches?

and then search only in the collection? Mm, this could be a workaround, but a bit complicated…

Search one word by criteria. → create collection.
Search the other word by the other criteria. → add to collection.

Search the collection. → Many (if not all) of the "wonderful"s will be left out of the collection. At least it is narrower this way.

Beside using RegEx, there is no absolute answer to your original (intended) question.

Yes, that could work. Thank you Vincent. Is this the same gr means with “just perform two searches”?

I think so, kind of, yes.
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