How to add sentences with a particular combination of words?

[scarletpimpernel]

When I want to add sentences with a particular word to my collections I go to Cloze-Collections > Add sentences > Paste in words. I mention the word for which I want to find sentences. Then I select and add.

My question is, how do I search for sentences which have two words? For example, I want to find German sentences with “erst als”. If I enter “erst, als” in the list of words it gives me sentences with “erst” and sentences with “als” - OR function, not sentences with both “erst” and “als” - AND function.

Can someone enlighten me if and how I can accomplish this? Many thanks in advance!

[MsFixer]

@scarletpimpernel

I guess you are trying to add sentences with a “set phrase”. If so, don’t use Cloze-Collections > Add sentences > Paste in words.

• STEP 1: Go to the “general sentence search” on the right upper side.
• STEP 2: Type the two words WITHOUT a comma in the search bar.
• STEP 3: Click the “Add to Collection” button.
• STEP 4: Change the {{cloze-word}} as you wish, and add a personal hint if necessary.

STEP 1

---

STEP 2

---

STEP 3

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STEP 4

Hope this helps!

[scarletpimpernel]

Hey thanks a lot! This was helpful. Can I use regular expressions to search for sentences? Like, I want to search for a sentence with two words but not immediately after one another as a single string i.e. searching for a sentence with two separate strings.

[alanf_us]

It once was possible to search with regular expressions, but not anymore.

Pro tip: use regular expressions for searching

Maybe you are not all aware of the fact that you can use regular expressions for searching on collections. It’s an undocumented feature, and it seems to only operate on individual words, but it’s nevertheless a very useful thing to know. I will not try to explain regular expressions here; you can google that. But here are a couple examples (don’t include the double quotes): find all occurrences of ‘scomparso’ or ‘sparito’: “scomparso|sparito” find all occurrences of words beginning with ‘scom…

However, it seems like simple wildcard search (*) is supported:

Regex search no longer working

I know it wasn’t an official feature, but until recently the sentence search would accept regular expressions such as “.*” (to search for zero or more wildcard characters). Unfortunately, this has stopped working, probably as a consequence of a bug fix.

Please try it without the ., so for example mang* to get mange, manger, etc.

[scarletpimpernel]

Oh that’s a shame… regex search for sentences would make learning process far more efficient

Do you know how I can search for a sentence with two words in it but not necessarily one after the other?

[MsFixer]

@scarletpimpernel
As Alan explained, the only regex you can use is an asterisk as a wildcard. But it cannot be used to search for two words which are not directly connected to each other. – e.g., Suppose that your target phrase is “look forward to”. In this case, look*to doesn’t work because a wild card is disabled when the right or left side of the asterisk is separated by a space (i.e. not working for more than one words).

An asterisk is useful if you search for sentences containing “real”, “realistic”, “unreal”, or “unrealistic” by typing *real*. The suffix “-istic” and the prefix “un-” are directly conjugated with the root with no space.

But a wildcard sometimes hits too many sentences, and there is no way to narrow them down. For more information about this side effect, please refer to a related discussion: Question: Advanced search with wildcards. I posted it six months ago, but as far as I know, nothing has been changed with regard to the advanced search. I guess the advanced search is not a high priority for the Clozemaster tech team.