Case Sensitive Search?

Jamie1 · February 13, 2020, 9:32pm

Yo yo,

Is there a way to exclude case sensitive search, so that the results include everything?

For example, searching for “User Stories”, “User stories”, and “user stories”, yield three different results.

I’d like to be able to search for “user stories” and it returns everything with those characters, regardless of their case. In this example, the reasons why they are different cases is because some are used as regular text, and some are used as titles

I did check here, but couldn’t find an answer! https://help.dynalist.io/article/93-search-operators-reference

Thanksssss in advance

Erica · November 24, 2019, 2:24pm

Which search are you using? I tried searching for something (without quotes) and it matched all the cases.

I’m using the simplest in-document search, not global search or flat search.

Jamie1 · November 24, 2019, 3:27pm

Global search!

I did a search like yours above without the quotes. It returns more of the results, but of course returns false positives too, like singular instances of the word ‘stories’

Erica · November 24, 2019, 3:36pm

I’m afraid I still don’t understand what you want. This is what I get from global search:

They didn’t return different results like you mentioned:

Did I miss something? A screenshot would help too. I still have trouble understanding what does the “more of the results” part mean, and of course what “false positives” mean. It must be very clear in your head but unfortunately not clear to me at the moment

Jamie1 · November 24, 2019, 5:48pm

Searching for user stories without the quotes means you get non-exact matches (false positives) like ‘history’ and ‘users’ in this screenshot.

However, if I search with quotes, it’s case sensitive—and I only receive one result.

Another search with the same phrase but a different case yields another single result, which is different to the one above

Without the quotes, there’s 16 matches—but with non-exact matches like the first screenshot.

So in summary, there’s two outcomes.

You search with quotations but it must be case sensitive. User story, User Story and user story will give you three different search results.
You search without quotations, but receive non-exact matches like ‘history’

Jamie1 · November 25, 2019, 10:31am

Hope the above made better sense! Please let me know if not, and I’ll try again haha.

Erica · November 25, 2019, 8:15pm

Yep that 100% makes sense now. I was struggling to come up with a solution yesterday, sorry for not replying earlier. Please gimme some more time to think about it and see if there exists any workaround.

Jamie1 · November 25, 2019, 10:30pm

No worries. No rush!

Daniel · February 12, 2020, 6:49pm

I would love this ability as well. I have SO much data in Dynalist, that I rely heavily on exact searches. However, I don’t like having to put in every possible letter case option for every search.

Jamie1 · February 13, 2020, 10:11am

I forgot about this. Thanks for bumping up @Daniel !

Erica · February 13, 2020, 9:32pm

Let’s open a new feature request for it if one doesn’t exist already.

Maybe we can add a “Match case” checkbox to global & flat search screen like in the search and replace dialog:

Don’t think we’ll add it to the search bar in the first pass though. The space there is a bit more limited. (By search bar I’m referring to the element below)