Filtering Techniques

The

Filter action has two different ways to compare the contents of a field: contains and matches.

The contains comparison matches the contents of a field exactly to the characters you enter. You cannot use wildcards.

The matches comparison also matches the contents of a field to the characters you enter as a match expression. Results are considered a match as long as the expression occurs somewhere within the content of the field. However, the comparison is not case sensitive. And you can use wildcards to make the comparison more general or more specific.

Note: Match expressions are regular expressions - a technical and very flexible syntax for matching groups of characters. There are many additional features in regular expressions that you can use in comparisons with a matches filter condition which are not covered in this topic.

Some of the most useful wildcards that you can use in a match condition are shown below.

For	Use Wildards	Examples
Any single character	.	bas. would match"bas","bass" or "base" but not"bases".
Any number of characters	.*	jav.* would match a field containing "Mojave","Java","javascript" or"Javier".
Field starts with	^	^Dow would match a field that began with"Dow Jones", but not one that contained"window". Dow, however, would match both a field that began with"Dow Jones" and one that contained"window".

If you need to match any of the wildcard characters themselves, use \ before. So Mr\. would match"Mr." but would not match "Mrs".