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Search Syntax | |||
Searching for Mouse Lines
General StrategyWhen you search for Mouse Lines on our site, you will find the most success by starting with a simple query and working to narrow that down once you see what it returns. Our search engine looks for mouse lines which contain all of the terms you've indicated, so a long detailed query may fail because one of the many terms wasn't found (even if all the others matched). When zero matches are found, the search engine will indicate this fact, and will show all mouse lines so that you may browse through them. A search form will also let you perform another search. By starting with a very simple query, you can ensure that you're on the right track. You can use a search form at the bottom of your results to add or remove mouse lines from the result set. If your query has too many results, you can remove some lines. If your query has too few results, you can add lines to your result set. ShortcutsIf you already know which mouse line you need, you can jump directly to that mouse line with any of the following shortcuts:
If your query contains multiple terms, then the above shortcuts will not apply. Words and PhrasesA query is composed of one or more words and/or phrases. Several words in a row are not automatically considered a phrase by the search engine. For example, frequent seizures would be considered two words and would match any text which contained both words, whether the words appeared together or not. To force the search engine to treat a sequence of words as a phrase, place either single or double-qoutes around the words: 'frequent seizures' or "frequent seizures" or 'Mickey "the mogul" Mouse' or "smith's syndrome". Note that you can select which type of quote to use based on what the phrase will contain. If the phrase needs to contain both types of quotes, then you can use a backslash before a quote to indicate that the quote should be taken literally rather than as the end of the quoted string. For example: 'Mickey "the mogul" Mouse\'s syndrome'. Should you need to search for an actual backslash character, simply escape the backslash with another backslash. You can also combine as many words and phrases as needed within a single query. Howver, keep in mind the advice above about starting with a simple query. If you use many words and phrases in one query, the search engine will only find mouse lines which match all of the terms. Case SensitivityEach word or phrase is considered individually to see if it can match in a case-insensitive manner or if it must match case-sensitively. If the word or phrase contains any upper-case characters, then it must match case-sensitively. If the word or phrase contains only lower-case letters, then it can match without regard for case. In general, you will want to type your queries in all lower-case.
Fuzzy MatchesWhen you don't know how to spell a word, or that word might be spelled in multiple ways, or when you want to include different forms of the same word, you may want to use one (or both) of two meta characters. The question mark indicates zero or one arbitrary (non-whitespace) characters. The asterix indicates zero or more arbitrary (non-whitespace) characters. To include these meta characters as literal characters in your search, escape them with a backslash character prefix. Should you need to search for an actual backslash character, simply escape the backslash with another backslash.
Partial WordsWhen you use a word (or include a word as part of a phrase) in your query, the search engine assumes that you mean to look for entries which contain that word as a word, rather than as part of some other word. For example, a search for fun would look for the word fun and would fail to match the word disfunctional. To work around this, you can use the asterix meta character.
Unusual CharactersIf you need to search for any 'funny' characters, you have two choices. The first is to use the question mark meta character and the second is to use the HTML named entity encoding for the character. The first method is the most simple, but if you prefer to use the second (which is the more specific query syntax), you can find a list of entity encodings at w3.org. Either P?rez or Pérez will match Pérez;. The first is easier to type, but will also match Prez, Perez, Phrez, etc. The second will only match Pérez but is more work to type. Searching Specific FieldsBy default, when you enter a word or phrase, the search engine searches every mouse line data field (this does not include image comments) for a match. If you would like, you can prefix your word or phrase to tell the search engine to only look in one field for a match to that word or phrase. For example, if you wanted to find lines with a mutation on chromosome 5, searching for 5 might give you way too many irrelevant results. However, searching for chromosome:5 would only match those lines which had a 5 in their chromosome field. You can combine targeted phrases with other targeted phrases and/or with untargeted phrases. For example, chromosome:5 bald would find lines which had 5 in their chromosome field, and bald in any field while chromosome:5 comments:"Micky Mouse" would find lines which had 5 in their chromosome field and Micky Mouse in their comments field. In order to allow for faster typing, and to avoid a requirment that you memorize the name of each field, there are a number of synonymous prefix values you may use to search any field. For example, all of the following are equivilant: chromosome:5, chrom:5, chr:5, ch:5. Below are a list of the canonical field names, and the synonymous prefix values which may be used to target a search phrase:
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