Pitney Bowes MapInfo Stratus - Manual (Page 21)

2. A “?” can be used in place of any single character.
The most common form of wildcard search is where you place a * at the end of the phrase you are
searching.
For example, searching for “cam” may return results such as “Cam Road” but it will not return “Camden
Road”. Searching for “cam*” will return results that start with “cam”. For example “Camden Road” and
“Cambridge Road” would be returned if they were present in the dataset being searched.
A single character wildcard can be used where you are unsure of the spelling. For example searching
for “jo?ner” would return both “joiner” and “joyner”.
A wildcard is only supported if it is in the middle or end of a phrase. For example you cannot search
“*way”. Searching in this way will return no results.
More Search Options
MapInfo Stratus supports following search options:
Special characters: Any characters other than * and ? will be searched literally. This includes characters
such as “\” “/” and brackets. If for example the address data has text enclosed in brackets, for example
if all underground stations are indicated with brackets like this “Kentish Town Road Station (Underground)”
and you wish to search all underground stations then you must include the brackets and search for
“(underground)”.
Number Ranges: For number searches, you can search for either a single number or a number range
using two numbers. If searching for two numbers you can separate them using a dash or space. Given
below are the four sample searches:
1. “8-12 High Street”
2. “8 12 High Street”
3. “8 High Street”
4. “12 High Street”
In cases 1 and 2 the results will include addresses where both 8 and 12 are present in the address.
Results that contain only an 8 or a 12 are not returned. In case 3 if you searched for a single number
such as “8 High Street” you would see results returned that include 8 as a single number or as a number
range. Hence 1, 2 and 3 returned.
Similarly, in case 4 a search for “12 High Street” would return results 1, 2 and 4. However, a search for
"10 High Street" would not return results for "8-12 High Street". We make no assumption that the range
8-12 includes number 10. Only results that are for 10 High Street or which include 10 in a number range
such as 10-12 High Street would be returned.
Apostrophes: If you have an address that has “’s” in the string like king’s, then you can use either kings
or king’s to search and any results that have “kings” or “king’s” will be returned. You do not need include
the apostrophe, but if you do, then the results will still be the same.
Quotes: If you are using quotes “” in your search, you might get unexpected results as MapInfo Stratus
will explicitly search for terms that include the quotes in the address. We recommend not to use quotes.
UK Postcodes: For UK Postcodes you can search the inner or outer code or specify the full postcode.
If specifying the full postcode you can enter it either using a space between the inner and outer code or
enter the whole postcode without spaces. MapInfo Stratus will correctly search and find the matching
postcodes.
Recently Selected Addresses
In the Search Text box, before typing any text, if you click the down arrow it displays recently selected
addresses.
21 MapInfo Stratus User's Guide
Chapter 3: Search and Query Builder