When searching in TIBCO Spotfire, at times searching a value with phrases may not give the expected result in listbox filter of Spotfire. For example, if the values in list box filter are:

abcd

abc

abc d

abc-d

abc1d

Searching for "abc" (with quotes) returns the following:

abc

abc d

abc-d

Why are three values returned instead of only "abc"? Why isn't "abcd" returned?

When searching for a phrase specified in quotes, they are matched at word boundaries. A word boundary is something that starts with a word character <A-Z> or <a-z> or <0-9> or _ and ends with a non-word character like space and special characters. Therefore "abc", "abc d", and "abc-d" all contain the full word "abc" and are returned. The value "abcd" is not returned as "abc" is not present as a complete word within the string.

Alternatively, searching for abc (without quotes) would list all of the above values as it will only search if the abc is present in the string at all, not considering word boundaries.

This article explains how search works in TIBCO Spotfire when the phrase is in quotes (eg. "example")

Doc: Searching in TIBCO Spotfire

• https://docs.tibco.com/pub/sfire-analyst/10.3.2/doc/html/en-US/TIB_sfire-analyst_UsersGuide/search/search_searching_in_tibco_spotfire.htm

External: Word Boundaries

• https://www.regular-expressions.info/refwordboundaries.html