what's the purpose of 'Whole item'?

[Paul Unger]

In Lexicon > Lexicon Edit > Filter for... (in the column drop-downs), there are a number of 'environment' choices. One of them is 'Whole item'. [This also appears in places like Texts & Words > Concordance > Specify Concordance Criteria.] I can't seem to get this option to return the results that I expect or hope it will... If, for example, I'm looking for lexical items that describe groups of ten (ten eggs, ten garden rows, ten shells, etc.), I enter 'ten' in Definition > Filter for... and select 'Anywhere' I get a list of 132 items, some of which are only there because 'ten' is found in 'consistency'. Not the narrow set of results that I'm looking for. I would expect that selecting 'Whole item' would return results that only have 'ten' as an independent whole and not part of another word. However, the results are zero when I try it... I've tried adding a leading and a trailing space, but that hasn't helped. I've consulted Help and all I've found (in "Using Filter for") is that "Whole item adds leading and trailing #". OK...

Can someone help me understand "Whole item" in FLEx? I'd appreciate it.

Paul

[Craig Farrow]

Hi Paul,

As you've observed, the Anywhere option doesn't care about content, as
long as it can find the search item anywhere in the field. So "ten"
matches "ten", "tent", "often", etc.

Whole Item requires the whole field to match. So "ten" matches "ten"
only (ignoring case according to the "match case" checkbox), and nothing
else.

What you are looking for is the regular expression "\bten\b", which
requires the "ten" to be bordered by non-word characters such as spaces,
periods, punctuation, or start/end of the field. In the help under
"Examples of Regular Expressions" it says this:

\b Perform "whole words only" search, as \bword\b. E.g. In "This is a
nice island." \bis\b matches only the "is" but not "This" and "island."

HTH,

Craig.

On 24/06/2016 8:02 a.m., Paul Unger wrote:
> In Lexicon > Lexicon Edit > Filter for... (in the column drop-downs),
> there are a number of 'environment' choices. One of them is 'Whole
> item'. [This also appears in places like Texts & Words > Concordance >
> Specify Concordance Criteria.] I can't seem to get this option to
> return the results that I expect or hope it will... If, for example,
> I'm looking for lexical items that describe groups of ten (ten eggs,
> ten garden rows, ten shells, etc.), I enter 'ten' in Definition >
> Filter for... and select 'Anywhere' I get a list of 132 items, some of

> which are only there because 'ten' is found in 'consis*ten*cy'. Not
> the narrow set of results that I'm looking for. I would /expect/ that
> selecting 'Whole item' would return results that /only/ have 'ten' as

> an independent whole and not part of another word. However, the
> results are zero when I try it... I've tried adding a leading and a
> trailing space, but that hasn't helped. I've consulted Help and all

> I've found (in "Using Filter for") is that "*Whole item* adds leading

> and trailing #". OK...
>
> Can someone help me understand "Whole item" in FLEx? I'd appreciate it.
>
> Paul

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[Paul Unger]

That does, Craig. Thanks. Be nice to have '\b...\b' as a clickable option along with the others...

Paul