Hi! Exploring Anki universe for a few weeks now in hope to make my Chinese studies do a leap of effectiveness ))
I have a feature request or a howto question (depending on whether it’s already implemented or not, or maybe a good addon for that exists):
So, the task is: Search multiple words at once in browser
I.e. you input a number of words (space, comma etc separated) into the search field and then you press search, the browser shows all the searched words (except for the not found ones, of course).
Usage: having a list of words to study, be able to filter them in browser from an existing deck and then unsuspend/flag/tag etc the items you need or copy/move them to another deck and so on, in order to reach the final aim - focus on learning these target cards.
It would be highly handy also to select the separating symbol of user’s choice depending on the type of word list he/she has as an input (mine for instance is a simple column of words, i.e. separated with a new line feed mark).
Thank you so much!
Of course I tried OR and other operators alike, but found none. Now I checked again and found that aside from the ORs, linefeeds were remaining in the search field, that’s why nothing was found. Now it works, I’ll dig into this to better understand how in detail ))
But I also found a strange behavior (but maybe I missed something again):
when I search for three words (separated by OR), in the specific field (SIMPLIFIED), I get additional results marked as searched for though I didn’t input them in the search field (word 探索, marked blue in the screenshot attached).
These results were in SentenceSimplified field (I restricted the search to the field SIMPLIFIED), which also contained the word I did searched (宇宙, also highlighted blue in the second screenshot).
But marked bold as the search result was the word 探索 that also was the headword of the card (and which I didn’t search for, but which contained the actually searched word 宇宙 in the SentenceSimplified field)
To give more details to @Rumo’s answer, the idea is that or operators have less precedence than everything else, so your query is actually understood as "Contains 探索 in the simplified field, or contains 探索", which is not what you wanted (rather: “Contains 探索 in the simplified field, or contains 探索 in the simplified field”). So you would have to repeat the simplified: keyword before each substring you are searching.
There is also a way to express “Contains 探索 or 探索 in the simplified field”, but that requires more “sophisticated” queries. Instead of searching for a subtext in a given field, you are asking if a given field matches a regular expression pattern (see regular expressions). If you are unfamiliar with regular expressions, you might as well learn them (the fundamentals, that turn out to be 95% of what you will ever need, are quite simple). To ask to match a regex instead of asking if it contains a substring, you have to preceed the pattern with re:. In a regular expression, or is expressed with |. However, if you don’t want to learn, that’s fine, Anki’s browser was made so that you don’t need to, for example by providing you with the or operator.
