newsbin.com

How to search for:

(string1 AND string2) AND (string3 OR string4)

Examples that find hits(in any order):

pebbles fred barney
wilma fred barney
pebbles fred wilma barney

Another search:

(string1 AND string2) OR (string3 AND string4)
(barney AND fred) OR (wilma AND pebbles)

Example hits would have(in any order):
fred barney
pebbles wilma
barney fred
pebbles wilma

Thanks in advance!

Regular Expressions can't really be compared to binary searches in some cases. To get close to this:

(string1 AND string2) AND (string3 OR string4)

Would look something like this

string1.*string2.*(string3)?(string4)?

But order is important. So do to this:

pebbles fred barney

In any order would be a long RE. You'd have to list all the combinations manually.

Now if you set up a filter profile, you could enter each keyword on a different line in the Add Filters screen and then Newsbin will AND them all together so, they will work in any order.

To do this:

(string1 AND string2) OR (string3 AND string4)

Try

(string1.*string2)?(string3.*string4)?

Thanks, I'll use the expressions and give the filter approach a try as well.

So for (fred AND barney) AND (wilma OR pebbles)

can I put fred barney in the filter and put (string3? string4?) in the search field?

Yeah, that should work. Best thing to do is play with it and see what happens.

It appears the filters work only when searching subjects from "find" in the view messages window. I need to search thousands of groups.

From my tests, I must use a regex with the logic for four strings to search all of the groups at once.

Is there a source of simple regex expressions (like we discussed earlier fred/barney/wilma/pebbles example) free on the 'Net? I looked at several I found with google, but they were too complicated for a newbie.

thanks

Try http://www.regular-expressions.info/reference.html. We point to it from our own help pages.