Search help: searching on a "?"

[Steve Loosley]

Is it possible to search for sentences that end in a question mark (i.e., "?")?

 

Since the ? symbol is reserved as a wildcard symbol for searches, I'm stumped. I'd like to search a list of verses for all that are rendered as a question.

 

Is this by chance possible?

 

Thanks,

-steve.

[David Lang]

Steve,

 

This is one of the many features you'll get with the next major upgrade of Accordance. Version 7 should be available in the first half of next year.

 

In the meantime, here are a couple of possible workarounds:

 

1. Display the entire text of an English Bible by typing an asterisk (*) in verse search mode. Then choose Save as Text File --> Plain Text... from the File menu. Open the resulting text file in a text editor like BBEdit or TextWrangler and search for all occurrences of the question mark.

 

2. If you don't want to go outside of Accordance, try this:

 

a. Enter a series of interrogative pronouns separated by commas and within parentheses. For example:

 

(what, has, did, does, why, how, is, will)

 

b. Select "WITHIN" from the Enter Command submenu of the Search menu, and replace the selected question mark with the number "1".

 

c. Select "FIELD" from the Enter Command submenu of the Search menu. In the dialog box which appears, make sure BEGIN is selected and click OK.

 

Your search argument should now look like this:

 

(what, has, did, does, why, how, is, will) <WITHIN 1 Words> [FIELD Begin]

 

d. Open the More Options section of the Search window, and choose Sentence from the pop-up menu labeled "Search within every".

 

e. Click OK to perform your search.

 

This search will find every place where one of the words in parentheses appears at the very beginning of a sentence. I tried it with the Holman Christian Standard Bible and got 1590 occurrences. That's about half of the questions I got searching for the question mark using a pre-release version of Accordance 7.0.

 

I hope this helps.

[Steve Loosley]

Save as Text File --> Plain Text... from the File menu. Open the resulting text file in a text editor like BBEdit or TextWrangler and search for all occurrences of the question mark.

Thanks David. With a little effort, got the job done. (I should have figured that out myself