can you use a double iterating text filter when selecting values in Qlik?

[DutchArjo]

I have a table with a colum with contains a lot of text. I have many, many records in my dataset. My job is to find al records that have something to do with the word 'laser'. I typed laser followed by enter in the selection field, giving me 855 records, which is to much to read through carefully.

I then noticed many records have the word lasergun in it so I want to exclude this word in my selection.

I read in the qlik documentation about searching text you can exclude/include specific strings from the results.

I tried -lasergun +laser but this didn't work. Is there any way to get some lower level text filters which only filter the results from the first filter?

So my first filter is to exclude the word 'lasergun'. Then I want to select all the records that contain the word laser (or perhaps, the other way around: first select all records that contain the word laser, after that, exclude the records that have the word lasergun)?

[rwunderlich]

I would think 

-lasergun +laser 

would work. Did you remove the * from the search string?

-Rob

[DutchArjo]

I tried again this morning and had succes with -lasergun +laser.
I wanted to expand this though by also excluding [ ] 2:1 E Gebruik Lasers.

So my filter would become: -lasergun -"[ ] 2:1 E Gebruik Lasers." +laser

However, again this does not work. perhaps when I wait another week because it also took some time for -lasergun +laser to actually work as wanted.

[marcus_sommer]

Search-terms with spaces and/or any kind of special chars like quotes and brackets will make the matter more complicated because the search-term itself will need be wrapped with quotes and/or quotes needs to be masked (usually by doubling them) and more advanced stuff.

I wouldn't go this way because even if a proper syntax could be found it would be too complex to be practically used. Therefore I suggest you switch to search-expressions with match/wildmatch-approaches by considering to combine several ones with AND and/or OR connections in an if-loop.