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Digital Tradition Search Patterns

See what AskSam says about search syntax.

A query supplied to the Digital Tradition server as a Search Keyword is used as a pattern to select songs that contain one or more words or phrases. Upper and lower case differences are ignored. The special characters used in Digital Tradition search queries are: SPACE,AND, OR, *

The simplest query contains a single word. For example, to find songs containing the word "diving", use the query:

diving

Multiple Word Searches

A query can also be a list of word patterns separated by "AND" or "OR". The "AND" indicates that all of the words must occur in a song (in any order) for a match.

swimming AND diving

The "OR" character indicates that only one of the words need occur.

swimming OR diving

Use a space character between words to search for a phrase or sequence of words.

swimming pool
wooden boats

Wildcards

Wildcard word patterns may be specified by placing an asterisk "*" character anywhere within a word. The asterisk will match any sequence of letters or digits (useful for matching singular or plural endings).

swimm*
wooden boat*

Note that when "AND" and "OR" are both used, the "AND" terms are always grouped first (sorry, no parentheses).

pool AND swim* OR lake AND swim*

When searching for a phrase, square brackets [] are use. For example "[wooden boats]".

[wooden boats]

Keywords

Most songs in the database include one or more category keywords prefixed with an at "@" character, so you can use "@" to select from one or more categories. Make sure there is no space bewteen the "@" and the keyword.

@food AND @parody
@ballad AND lake

See the List of Keywords Used.

Ballads from the Child collection are marked with "Child #...", so to search for all Child ballads or a specific one, try searches like:

Child #84
Child #36

Beginning with the April 1996 version, new additions to the database are marked with a tag indicating the version date (e.g. "apr96"), so to search for all songs added in a particular version, try a search like:

apr96

The examples above are linked to the Digital Tradition server, so selecting them will perform the corresponding search. See also About The Digital Tradition.

updated 9/24/96 by The Bartender