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Help - How can I find two occurences of a character within a field?


laf

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I need to search a database of over 15,000 records to find email addresses that contain the @ symbol twice within the field. The second "@" is not immediately next to the first "@". I cannot figure out how to get this search in correctly. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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I tried *@*@ but it didn't work. (I know that I have at least one occurrence of the double @ in an email field, but this didn't find it.)

But thank you for your help! Any other suggestions? If I can't come up with something, I am going to have to manually look through the 510 page report (my head hurts just thinking about that...).

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You should be able to do this in a text editor. If you can post a real sample of data, I'll work out the pattern to find and replace using Regular Expressions in a Grep, in TextWrangler (Free text editor from Bare Bones Software). and post them back for you.

HTH

Lee

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Interesting. I didn't know that "zero or more characters" does NOT include ¶. But I don't see how adding == helps, on the contrary:

==*@*@ does NOT find:

a@b@c

a@b b@a

Both of these are found by plain *@*@. The string a@b¶a@c is NOT found with or without the ==. Very peculiar, thanks for pointing this out.

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You need to add the final star yourself when using ==, so if you use: ==*@*@* it will find those also.

== is a request to search the entire field contents, where normal searches only search words or values (newlines separate values).

Edited by Guest
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Hmm... There's still something weird going on here. What you say makes sense: a "normal" search should not cross word/value boundaries.

So *X*X* does NOT find "aXa aXa", nor "aXa¶aXa".

But it seems like replacing X with a word-delimiting character (other than space) is messing up the rules, because */*/* DOES FIND "a/a a/a", but NOT "a/a¶a/a" (two values).

Edited by Guest
Fixed a typo
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