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Searchable Metadata - Part 2

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Andrew1

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Joined
Dec 11, 2015
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30
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom version: 6.13 [ 1141928 ]
Operating System
  1. Windows 7
During my investigations into searchable metadata (in another thread) I've noticed some very strange results when the search string includes the hash '#' character.
Is anyone aware of '#' having any mystical properties as some sort of a wildcard, or maybe being ignored completely?
Or is search perhaps strictly limited to A-Z and 0-9 ?
Inquiring minds need to know ...
 
In the Lua coding language that is central to Lightroom, # means "the number of". For example, some Lua code might refer to the selected photos as MyPhotos, so #MyPhotos would calculate the number of selected photos. It might also be "the length of", so if MyFilename refers to the first selected photo's filename, #MyFilename would tell you how many characters it's got.

While # is special, I am not clear exactly how it might interfere with searchable metadata. However I am not too surprised.
 
John,
Thanks for the note on '#'.
Since you're here, I'll enquire whether you would expect your Search/Replace plugin to have any problems searching on '#' characters. If not I may just register that and do a mass replace of the '#' with something less confusing.
The original intent was simply to render one particular IPTC field uniquely searchable and it's had exactly the opposite effect. 'XX' would be just as unique, if not quite so pretty!
-Andrew
 
To be frank, Andrew, I am not 100% certain since I have never seen this problem and haven't tested for it. But I just tested a couple of things and I could insert a # normally and could search for it and replace, too. I don't see any problem. Why not test it yourself on <10 images? You could always add a pipe | character or something other that XX.

John
 
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