Can't search for a url that's in a field

Anki Help
1

Hi,

I have a note field that contains a link to a different site, but when I try to search for the note that contains a certain url my search fails. I don’t know why it’s happening. It happens for certain links but not for others.

For example, the issue is happening with this link

http://localhost:8081/#:[created[20240521160030107]],

but not with https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zB2cf1tzHqvLRg5Px4rBNbq

The way that I am searching for the url is re:URL

re:http://localhost:8081/#:[created[20240521160030107]]

re:https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zB2cf1tzHqvLRg5Px4rB
2

Read the part of the manual that talks about searching.

some characters like *, _ and " have a special meaning in Anki. If you need to locate those characters in a search, you need to tell Anki not to treat them specially.

To match something including spaces, enclose the “entire term” in double quotes.

I have quoted some parts that might be relevant to you but do read the manual on your own.

3

I read the manual before posting the question but I still don’t understand what I am doing wrong to be honest. I am still learning about regular expressions, so they confuse me a little bit. I just re-read the searching section of the manual and tried the following searches and I am still stumped.

re:http://localhost:8081/#:[created[20240521160030107]]

"re:http://localhost:8081/#:[created[20240521160030107]]"

re:"http://localhost:8081/#:[created[20240521160030107]]"

"re:http://localhost:8081/#\:[created[20240521160030107]]"
4

Sorry mate. AFAIK using " " should’ve worked.
It works for me when I’m searching for text. BTW you are sure that piece of text exists in the field of a card (in the deck you’re searching)?

5

Here’s some more info about my issue:

I have a deck called playground (the deck I use to test new features and mess around with Anki without having it affect my real cards).

In that deck, I created a note that has a field called relatedTiddler. In the field relatedTiddler of the note, I put a URL like

http://localhost:8081/#:[created[20240521160030107]]

in it.

(I also tried to search for the URL by the field by doing something like this
relatedTiddler:re:http://localhost:8081/#:[created[20240521160030107]]
and that didn’t work.)

I don’t search by the deck, if that’s what you are asking. But the note is in the playground deck.

6

I tried searching for http://localhost:8081/#:[created[20240521160030107]] myself and it seems the colon is creating the problem.

7

Yea, I think that might be it. I tried to escape it (don’t know if I did it correctly), but that didn’t work for me.

8

", * and _
Add a backslash before these characters to treat them literally. For example, _ will match any single character, but _ matches only an actual underscore.

Colons have to be escaped unless they are preceded by another, unescaped colon. So w:e:b is a word boundary search for e:b, w:e:b searches literally for w:e:b

You tried putting / ? Hmm… weird. I’ll try then.

Edit: Okay I can escape colons but what you do about the two // ?

two backslashes are considered one backslash AFAIK.

9

So, did it work for you? Were you able to search for the URL? What was your search query?

10

Are you trying to use regex on a template with JavaScript or are you using python for an add-on? This makes a difference here.

11

Not sure what you mean. I am not doing anything with JavaScript or Python (or at least I don’t think so). I am searching for a note that contains a specific URL using the browser.

1 Like
12

Oh. Now I get it. Yeah. I don’t know if the search bar uses javascript regex or python regex.

Try it either with this here: /http://localhost:8081/#:[created[20240521160030107]]/

Or this here:
r’http://localhost:8081/#:[created\[20240521160030107\]]’

Tell me which one works (or if it doesn’t work)

13

I tried them both and they didn’t work.

/http://localhost:8081/#:[created[20240521160030107]]/

r’http://localhost:8081/#:[created\[20240521160030107\]]’
14

This here?

re:http:\/\/localhost:8081\/#:\[created\[20240521160030107\]\]

EDIT:

I tested it in the card search. It works for me now.

1 Like
15

If you want to easily learn, how to do regex, use this page: https://regex101.com/ (and choose JavaScript on the left side, if you try to create regex for your card search :)! )

1 Like
16

Nah it didn’t. Backslashes were creating a problem. //localhost actually searches for /localhost because as I said “two /”= “one /”

regex is probably worth trying here.

1 Like
17

Will do!

1 Like
18

Yep, that worked for me too!

2 Likes
19

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