How to search with operators and wildcards

Impira enables you to run advanced search queries via operators (and, or) and wildcards (*, ?).

Example: Invoices

Let's run some search queries in this Collection of purchase orders.

We've already extracted fields like:

• Name
• Address
• Company
• PO Number
• Phone Number

Operators

To search for files where the value of the Name field is "Kimberly Neal":

Name:`Kimberly Neal`

It should look like this:

To search for files where the value of the Name field is "Kimberly Neal" AND the value of the PO Number field is "39":

Name:`Kimberly Neal` `PO Number`:39

It should look like this:

To search for files where the value of the Name field is "Kimberly Neal" OR the value of the PO Number field is "39":

Name:`Kimberly Neal` or `PO Number`:39

It looks like this:

To search for files where the value of the Name field is "Kimberly Neal" and the value of the PO Number field is not "39", include a minus symbol:

Name:`Kimberly Neal` -`PO Number`:39

It looks like this:

Tip: Backticks — the apostrophe lookalike

Backticks look a lot like apostrophes (ʼ) or single quotation marks (‘), so make sure you pick the right symbol on your keyboard as you write queries.

Image credits: Apple and Keychron

Range

To set lower and upper bounds in a query, you can also use range operators, such as > (greater than) or < (less than).

The syntax is as follows:

The following query free-text searches for “motherboard” in files where the Quantity field is less than 10 and the Date is greater than (i.e., comes after) March 23rd, 2020:

motherboard Quantity:<10 date:="">2020-03-23</10>

Wildcards

You can also use wildcards in your searches to match fields where the term given in the query is part of a longer string.

Impira supports the following wildcards:

• Asterisk (*): Matches any character sequence (including the empty one)
• Question mark (?): Matches any single character

For example, the query below matches any filename that ends with .jpg:

The following query would return matching search results for files containing values that start with "A," have any two characters in a row, then end with "le."

This query could return results like: Apple, Addle, A48le, or Ankle: