What's a word? In English? In ASCII?

[kennedy]

The manual states several times: an index is determined by up to the first 20 characters of each word for a total of up to 60 characters.

But the manual never answers: "What is a word?"

And I wonder if the word delimiters change with language... for example, maybe words are broken only by spaces in English, but by hyphens and spaces in ASCII. How about commas? Does punctuation break words?

Anyone know what's a word in English? in ASCII?

(I am using 14-digit keys in all my files. English vs. ASCII doesn't matter there (other than ASCII being a tad faster), nor do the character limits. However, when I need compound keys, I clearly need to make sure I use a word delimiter in between the two keys (or it'll drop the last 8 digits). Hyphens are often used in keys... but are hyphens word delimters in either English or ASCII?)

Thanks.

[Fitch]

"How Data is Indexed"

http://www.FileMaker.com/ti/101325.html

"Here is what is indexed for each type of field:

Text: The strings as entered except for punctuation and spaces."

http://www.FileMaker.com/ti/104408.html

"Indexing Non-Alpha-Numeric Characters"

http://www.FileMaker.com/ti/103680.html

Ah, I think this is the one:

"Non-Breaking Characters"

http://www.FileMaker.com/ti/102392.html

"Index Does not Recognize Accent Marks"

http://www.FileMaker.com/ti/101440.html