Searching for interrogative sentences

[RyanQuey]

Hello, I am trying to do a study on Greek interrogative sentences, but could not figure out if there was a way to search for punctuation marks (such as the semicolon). I wanted to do a search in order to survey when the GNT has interrogative sentences marked out, which would be a good launching point for this study. Is there a way to configure the syntax search to do this kind of thing, or perhaps is there a way to search for punctuation? Thanks!

 

[JonathanHuber]

The period followed by a character is a command for Accordance to search for that character, so your search could be done by simply entering ".;" (without the quotes).

[RyanQuey]

Great, thanks! For some reason, I tried searching the help database for "punctuation searches" and that kind of thing, but nothing came up. But this is perfect!

[Anon]

The man pages for Searching for a punctuation (a subset of a larger definition of 'Character') is under "Searches Using Symbols" > "More About the (.) Symbol".

[Randy Steffens Jr]

Can we search for two adjacent characters? like

 

-;

 

As found in Ex 32:32 KJV?

 

Randy

[Anon]

Randy:

 

You can use the followed by Search argument to capture your results.

 

The search string is: .- <FOLLOWED BY> <WITHIN 2 Words> .;

 

Remember, you'll want to reduce the scope to verse.

[Randy Steffens Jr]

Wow, that does it! Appreciate your help James. But why <WITHIN 2 Words>? Seems like it should be <WITHIN 1 Words>.

 

Randy

[Λύχνις Δαν]

I wondered about that having tried something very similar. Its worth noting that the Ex passage contains "--;" not merely "-;". If you simply search for ".-" the result in respect of this passage is interesting. It only finds the first dash not the second. It would appear for some reason that the second dash is invisible.

 

True full regex support in searches would be really nice for cases like this.

 

Thx

D

[Anon]

Yes, I too tried WITHIN 1 at first. I think this is a rather tricky issue, for it depends how Accordance is defining "Word". Sometimes you just have to experiment, until you discover how it works. It's also a bit tricky due to the way the hypen is used, as opposed to a en- or em-dash.

 

Daniel,

 

I did notice the the additional hyphen. I am away from my study, and didn't have access to a print version to check against.

[Randy Steffens Jr]

Thanks James. Perhaps if one of the Accordance admin gurus might happen upon this post, they can further elaborate?

 

Randy

[Steve King]

I wondered about that having tried something very similar. Its worth noting that the Ex passage contains "--;" not merely "-;". If you simply search for ".-" the result in respect of this passage is interesting. It only finds the first dash not the second. It would appear for some reason that the second dash is invisible.

 

True full regex support in searches would be really nice for cases like this.

 

Thx

D

 

There seems to be an inconsistency when searching for ".- <FOLLOWED BY> <WITHIN 2 Words> .- " It finds examples where there is only one "-" in the verse.

 

In the KSVS if finds Ex 18:19 which contains "God-ward" and Deut 32:31 which contains "Meribah-Kadesh" In both cases there appear to be no other hyphens within the verse. Note that is this case it also finds them when using <WITHIN 1 Words>.

 

Searching in the ESVS also finds many single hyphen entries within the verse. Interestingly enough it misses "sons-in-law" in Gen 19:14 but finds Beer-lahai-roi in Gen 16:14.

 

It appears that in certain cases the hyphen is associated with only one part of the word and in others with both parts.

[Randy Steffens Jr]

Yes Steve, I'm able to confirm this. I'm having the exact same problems. It looks like a bug.

 

Randy

 

Edited August 6, 2013 by Randy Steffens Jr