Finding text and characters

To find

Type this in the field

Examples

Words that start with specific roman characters (works with fields that use any language except Japanese)

The characters

Chris Smith finds Chris Smith, Smith Chris, Chris Smithson, and Smith Christenson

Words that start with Japanese hiragana, katakana, or kanji characters

The characters between = and *

A phrase or sequence of characters that match when they are the first characters in a word (match phrase from word start)

The literal text (characters), including spaces and punctuation, between double quotation marks (")

"Marten and Jones Interiors" finds Marten and Jones Interiors but not Jones and Marten Interiors

", Ltd." finds all companies with ", Ltd." in the name, but not those without the comma

"Spring" finds Springville but not ColdSpring Harbor or HotSpring

Words with one or more unknown or variable characters (any one character)

One wildcard character (@) for each unknown character

Gr@y finds Gray and Grey

@on finds Don and Ron but not Bron

Invalid characters in a text field

?

Invalid characters display as blank characters

Note  To find the ? character, search for "?"

Digits in a text field (any one digit)

A # character for each digit

# finds 3 but not 30

## finds 30 but not 3 or 300

#3 finds 53 and 43 but not 3

Words with zero or more unknown or variable text characters in a row (zero or more characters)

* for all unknown characters

Jo*n finds Jon and John

J*r finds Jr. and Junior

*phan* finds Phan and Stephanie

S* finds Sophie, Steve, and Sven

Operators or other non-alphanumeric characters, such as punctuation or spaces

The literal text (characters), including spaces and punctuation, between double quotation marks (")

"@" finds @ (or an email address, for example)

"," finds records containing a comma

"   " finds three spaces in a row

A character with special meaning, such as invisible characters or the find operators recognized by FileMaker Pro Advanced:

@, *, #, ?, !, =, <, >, " (escape next character)

\ followed by the special character

For a carriage return, in Browse mode, enter a carriage return in a field and copy it to the Clipboard. Then in Find mode, type \ and paste the carriage return.

For a tab, type \ then press Ctrl+Tab (Windows) or Option-Tab (macOS).

\"Joey\" finds "Joey"

joey\@abc.net finds the email address joey@abc.net

\
Joey finds Joey preceded by a carriage return

Words with accented characters

The literal text (characters), including spaces and punctuation, between double quotation marks (")

"òpera" finds òpera but not opera

(òpera without quotation marks finds both òpera and opera)

Partial phrases, a sequence of words or characters (match phrase from anywhere)

Characters, punctuation, and spaces between double quotation marks ("); use * to find this text in the middle of a longer text string

*"son & Phillips" finds

Johnson & Phillips and Paulson & Phillips

Exact matches of the text you specify (match entire field)

== (two equal signs) for a field content match

==John finds John but not John Smith

==John Smith finds John Smith but not Smith, John or John Smithers

Exact matches of whole words you specify (match whole word)

=

=Market finds Market, Market Services, and Ongoing Market Research but not Marketing or Supermarket

=Chris =Smith finds Chris Smith or Smith Chris but not Chris or Christopher Smithson

Words that contain Japanese hiragana, katakana, and kanji characters (Japanese-indexed fields only)

The characters

Kana characters in a Japanese-indexed field without differentiating between hiragana/katakana, voiced/semi-voiced/unvoiced kana, small/regular kana, and kana voiced/unvoiced iteration marks

~ (tilde) and the character, to do a relaxed search