SE that can handle punctuation

[simo92]

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hi,

Twice today I've hit problems because the string I wanted to search becomes something way too common if the SE treats punctuation the same as spaces. I wanted "hkey_classes_root\.key", but the results were all on the too-common phrase "hkey_classes_root key". And I wanted to help someone handle an unwanted file named "stream.str", but all I got was a ton of C# source code postings using the too-common construct "stream str".

IS THERE a search engine that will, when presented with a quoted string, search for *EXACTLY* that string??

[moredial]

The one way you can force the non alphanumeric characters is to use the % value,

ie %20 = space
%2E = .
%5C = \
%5F = _

The above should work with all search engines. You may get different results if pages are coded in utf-8.

Basically, search engines strip out all the non alphanumeric characters. In the non Latin charsets, the search string is converted to % values when the search is done.

If you are looking for script info, try live.com for most relevant results