Using an Apostrophe in a Search

[friedlanders]

Hi,

I've been creating Help topics in RoboHelp 8.0.2.208 and generate WebHelp. I've tried searching the forum for this problem and have come up empty; I'm sorry if I missed it.

We are tying to help our users use the Help topics and are running into a problem with finding the best way to search for a word with an apostrophe. I understand that the system disregards apostrophes but am not clear exactly how to tell our users to enter key phrases.

For instance, a user may want to search for Alysa's Law. If they enter:

• Alysa's Law, the search results bring up everything that contains s Law, s, or Law (I see this with the highlight on).
• Alysas Law, the search results bring up all incidents of Law or Alysa.
• "Alysas Law", the search results in No Topics Found.
• "Alysa's Law", the search results in No Topics Found.
• Alysa, the search results in No Topics Found.
• "Alysa", the search results in No Topics Found.
• Alysa's, the search results bring up every letter s.

Has anyone else run into this? Is it a bug? Is there something I can do in creating the Help files that will alleviate this? What would you see as the best recommendation we can give our users when searching for something like this?

Thanks. so much for any help!

[friedlanders]

Just want to add that we are finding the same thing with numbers with decimal points (which are probably being read as periods). For instance, we don't seem to have a way to find regulation 417.5.

[Peter Grainge]

I'm not sure it is a bug, just the way this search works.

Take a look at topics on my site and use the search there. I just checked and searched on 7.0.3 and it found a topic. If your testing works, I use ZoomSearch and how to integrate it into RH is described on my site.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[friedlanders]

Thanks, Peter. Unfortunately, I can't use ZoomSearch. It sounds like the perfect answer, but it is not allowed on the server for which I'm writing these files. Any ideas about how we can recommend searching for words/names with apostrophe-s?

(Just did a search in my files on 414.3 and got a number of "hits" - but when reviewing the topic, there was no 414.3 - only instances of 414 and 3 were highlighted.)

[Peter Grainge]

You don't install ZoomSearch on the server. You install it on your PC. That creates the data files needed and they are all that goes on the server. I cannot think why that would be unacceptable.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[friedlanders]

Thanks again, Peter. I'll have our IS people look into it. Does anything have to go on the user's pc's? Something caused out clients not to want it the last time we looked into it - we'll take another look.

[Peter Grainge]

Did anything have to go on to your PC to use my search? You install ZoomSearch on your PC, create the data files, user accesses them.

Have a read of the article.

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See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

@petergrainge

[friedlanders]

Hi, Peter -

Read your article - and would recommend it to anyone considering ZoomSearch. I do have one final question, though. Do you know how the statistics for reports are held? It looks like they are kept on the client's server. If they do not want these statistics on the server, can that part of ZoomSearch be disabled?

Thanks.

[MergeThis]

Yes, it can. Notice that if you use the easiest output of JavaScript, that feature is not even available (nor is exact phrase searching).

As to the apostrophe, you can use that and other punctuation marks as "join" characters in Zoom (we use these because our software uses a lot of dots, underscores, hash signs, etc. However, If you have "joined" a term such as "Ayla's" a user entry of "Ayla" will return no result.

Actually, whether you use the RH search or Zoom, you'd be best to encourage your users to use the asterisk (*) wild card to pick up all instances of a root (Ayla*).

Another plus for using Zoom is that we are adding search access to server-side class libraries. These libraries, which are not included in the merged WebHelp doc set, are maintained by the developers and added during the build process. However, I'm able to include a copy of the folders and include them in the Zoom run.

Good luck,

Leon