Special Characters in Searches

Description

Enterprise Vault (EV), Compliance Accelerator (CA) and Discovery Accelerator (DA) have the ability to search for items. The search criteria can include terms listed in the items. There are certain special characters, also known as reserved characters, that should not be used as part of the search criteria. Typically, such characters are not indexed, are indexed as periods (.) or denote specific functions. Their use in search criteria may cause unexpected results, increased EV Index resource usage and/or possible EV Index issues.

The following lists are not all-inclusive/exclusive and may be updated at any time.

Here is a list of special characters:

Ampersand &
Brackets [ ]
Braces { }
Back slash \
Caret ^
Colon : (except when used in EV Search query syntax)
Equal sign =
Exclamation point !
Forward slash / (except when used with the NEAR and BEFORE operators in CA/DA 14.3 and higher)
Greater than symbol >
Less than symbol <
Logical AND &&
Logical OR ||
Parentheses ( )
Percent sign %
Semicolon ;
Single quotation mark ' (except when used as an apostrophe)
Tilde ~
Vertical bar |

The following special characters may be used in Searches, but not literally as their usage may denote a specific function or may have a different value when indexed:

Asterisk *: Use an asterisk wildcard to represent zero or more characters.
At sign @: Commonly used in email addresses and represented as a period (.) when indexed.
Double period (number range) ..: Used to specify a data range in EV Search.
Double quotation mark ": Used to denote the start and end of a phrase (see notes below).
Minus sign -: Place the minus sign in front of a word or phrase to connect it to every other word or phrase on the line with a Boolean AND NOT condition in CA/DA.
Plus sign +: Place the plus sign in front of a word or phrase to connect it to every other word or phrase on the line with a Boolean AND condition in CA/DA.
Question mark ?: Use a question mark wildcard to represent any single character.

Notes

- Enclose phrases in double quotation marks. If copying and pasting quoted phrases from programs such as Microsoft Word, take care to replace any curly quotation marks ("smart quotes") with straight ones. CA/DA do not recognize curly quotation marks as double quotation marks.

- A search term cannot start with any of the following characters on any line: = + - @