How do I find special characters in a serach engine?

Question

I have been trying to do searches for special characters - for instance * or - in a search engine. Even when put between brackets "*superstar*" the only search results that turn up are "superstar" (example). Any idea how to search containing those special characters?

Answer 1

It depends on

1) What OS you are using

2) What 'Search Application' you are using.

Usually, any 'useful' Search Engine will have such information mentioned somewhere in its FAQ or Help area. Basically, what you are looking for are the relevant "metacharacters" for the system you are using - some systems don't have any.

In the UNIX/Linux environment, there are some rules. In Windows, there are others - similar.

These brief extracts may help your thought processes ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacharact...

Metacharacters

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A metacharacter is a character that has a special meaning (instead of a literal meaning) to a computer program, such as a shell interpreter or a regular expression engine.

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From: http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/Secu...

Many systems, such as the command line shell and SQL interpreters, have "metacharacters'', that is, characters in their input that are not interpreted as data. Such characters might be commands, or delimit data from commands or other data. If there's a language specification for that system's interface that you're using, then it certainly has metacharacters.

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Meta Characters

From http://www.certiguide.com/apfr/cg_apfr_M...

If several files are to be copied which have similar names to another directory, Meta characters (also know as wild cards) can used to accomplish it without repetitively having to run the copy command and re-type all those similar files names. Meta characters are similar to wild cards in the Windows or DOS environment but have significant additional capabilities.