finding email addresses

[JGF]

I need to know if there is a way to find email addresses without having to "" or /@ in the search. We perform most of our searches with email addresses.

Sorry if this has been covered, I couldn't find it.

J

[-Queue-]

@ is a symbol for a single character in FileMaker. So you have to escape or quote it for it to be taken literally.

[JGF]

I know, what I am asking is there a way to get around this... as it makes searching for email addresses more complicated than it needs to be.

[-Queue-]

No, that's what 'you have to' means...

Unless, of course, you had an additional calculation to convert @ to different characters, then do your finds on that field with the substitution.

E.g. field2: Substitute( field1; "@"; "[at]" )

[JGF]

well if that is the case, filemaker is a broken limping dog to me

[-Queue-]

Then don't use it.

There are characters in most every type of database or connectivity language that must be escaped. That is just the way it is. @ happens to be one of those characters in FileMaker. If you don't like it, try to find a program that doesn't use @ as a reserved character.

[JGF]

I actually already have a program that does not use it. I have been looking for a while to find a replacement as this one was writin many years ago and was written for dos and is no longer supported. It just seems that in these days of working on the web file make gives a little of a tease at functionality and stops short of full use. the web sharing could be enhanced and so could thinking that many people would use email addy's in their database and not reserving the one character that is in email...oh well, I guess I shall either live with it or move on

[surwoop]

Index your field with unicode as the language.

[-Queue-]

Ah yeah, forgot you can do that in 7. That will work for searching full addresses or addy*, addy@*, etc.

[The Shadow]

If doing a search for a full email address, you can also use:

[email protected]

The "@" special character will end up matching itself, and the correct email address will be found.

[-Queue-]

I think the double equals might fall under the category of an additional step they don't want to do.

You could also put the entire address in quotes, again too much work.

[JGF]

Thanks that may just be what I need!

Any ideas why import/export are not web features?

[JGF]

That is the indexing, I shall have to play with it a bit