Terms

Text fields can be evaluated as a set of tokens called terms. Depending on the underlying storage service, the terms may be generated and indexed when a text field is stored, or they may be computed dynamically. Generally, terms are alphanumeric character sequences separated by whitespace and/or punctuation.

In search clauses, multiple terms can be used, and each term can contain wildcards. Example search terms are shown below:

John

Fo*

a?c

Event_413

Note that terms are not quoted. A term is a sequence of characters consisting of letters, digits, or any of these characters:

? (question mark)

* (asterisk)

_ (underscore)

@ (at symbol)

# (hash or pound)

- (dash or minus)

In a term, the characters _, @, #, and - are treated as term separators, creating multiple terms that are part of the same literal. For example, the following literals all define two terms, john and smith – the separator character is not part of either term:

john_smith

john@smith

john#smith

john-smith

The characters ? and * are single- and multi-character wildcards: ? matches any single character and * matches any sequence of characters.

See the discussion on Contains Clauses for more details about using terms in searches.