Editing Help:Searching (section)

=== Spaces ===

The use of spaces is, in general, intuitive. Unnecessary spaces, and all non-alphanumeric characters except <code>"</code> are ignored, which makes for flexibility; it is simplest and best to avoid typing unnecessary spaces, although the tolerance for grey space simplifies copying and pasting search terms without the need for cleanup. For example, {{kbd|credit card}} is obviously reasonable; copying and pasting {{kbd|<nowiki>[[Credit(?!)card]]</nowiki>}} is equivalent and convenient; {{kbd|"credit card""payment card"}} is actually correct and minimal, but {{kbd|"credit card" "payment card"}} is an intuitive equivalent.

Any of the following characters will be treated as a [[space character]]: <code><nowiki>!@#$%^&()_+-=~`{}[]|\:;'<>,.?/</nowiki></code>. The double quotation mark <code>"</code> is not one of these characters, because it has the special purpose of specifying an exact phrase search, and <code>-</code> and <code>!</code> can be used to exclude results if either occurs at the beginning of a word or phrase (see more below). We use the term ''grey-space'' instead of ''[[Whitespace character|whitespace]]'' here to include the space character itself and all these characters. Multiple [grey-]spaces are equivalent to a single space.

Grey-space is ignored between the words of exact-phrase searches, between adjacent items in the query, and in starting characters of the search box query. All filters can have grey-space between them without affecting search results. Most operators, such as <code>intitle:</code> and <code>incategory:</code>, ignore unnecessary spaces, or grey-space, after the colon.

Where spaces are significant: single search terms cannot have embedded spaces; {{kbd|work space}}, {{kbd|"work space"}}, and {{kbd|workspace}} are all different. The particular keywords <code>prefix</code> and <code>insource</code> must be followed immediately by a colon <code>:</code> and their arguments, without intervening [grey-]spaces.