Looking for special characters in Google

google-searchspecial-characters

Do you know how to look for special characters with google…?

I'm looking at bash code and there's the ## operator. I would like to know what It does but I wasn't able to figure out a way to protect the character (I'm not sure it's even possible).

This is particularly annoying when you're looking for some code patterns, some characters are always ignored.

Best Solution

Google strips most punctuation from queries, as described here, so it won't help you with the bash syntax.

It's very easy to search for the string "##" in the bash documentation: Just run "info bash", hit "s", and enter "##" as the search string.

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R – Google using non-alphanumeric characters

We were frustrated by this too, so we made a search engine that allows special characters!

try http://www.symbolhound.com

it's a web search (unlike google codesearch) that respects symbols. This should help. The index is growing every day, so you should be able to find relevant responses!

Good luck.

Javascript – Remove all special characters with RegExp

var desired = stringToReplace.replace(/[^\w\s]/gi, '')

As was mentioned in the comments it's easier to do this as a whitelist - replace the characters which aren't in your safelist.

The caret (^) character is the negation of the set [...], gi say global and case-insensitive (the latter is a bit redundant but I wanted to mention it) and the safelist in this example is digits, word characters, underscores (\w) and whitespace (\s).

Best Solution

Related Solutions

R – Google using non-alphanumeric characters

Javascript – Remove all special characters with RegExp

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