am I regexing by mistake?

[David V Glasgow]

Hello, folks.

I am undertaking keyword searches of chat logs.  The keywords are stored as themed lists in fields.

One of the things I am interested in is finding lines where one contributor asks another about where they live, shop, go to school etc etc.  So, (among other phrases) I filter for lines in the text containing the acronym “ asl ” (nowhere are quotes actually included in fields or variables, they’re just in this mail).  I pad with spaces so as not to find “asleep”.  I also want to find “asl?”  

So I repeat through lines of the keyword field “location"

Filter lines of tsource with tpattern

…  which works for everything except fails to match “asl?”.  It occurred to me that perhaps the question mark is being interpreted as a regex symbol, so I tried changing the line in the field to read “ asl/?”, but that doesn’t find the “asl?” that I can see in the third line of the text to be searched….


shadownave (09/16/14 1:44:58 AM): hey care to chat
shadownave (09/16/14 1:45:09 AM): hey care to chat
what_sez_moo (09/16/14 1:45:18 AM): sure asl?
what_sez_moo (09/16/14 1:45:52 AM): 13 / F / Ashton here
shadownave (09/16/14 1:51:00 AM): 25/m/Derby
shadownave (09/16/14 1:51:03 AM): how r u tonight
what_sez_moo (09/16/14 1:51:16 AM): bored.


What am I doing wrong?  Is this something to do with regex?

Oh yes, and I thought there might be invisible characters messing things up, so I exported source text as plain text from BBedit, with no improvement.

best wishes

David Glasgow