Search Queries

The MoinMoin search engine is capable of using regex and other operators in the search input fields.

Additionally, the same search patterns are allowed as parameters in various search macros, such as for the FullSearch, TitleSearch, FullSearchCached, and PageList macros (see also HelpOnMacros).

Operator

Description

(space between keywords)

Several search terms separated by white space. By default, terms are connected by conjunction - only pages containing all search term are returned.
Double or single quotes may be used to include white space within search terms (phrase search), to search for the quotes themselves either quote them in the other type of quote or double them within a quoted string.

-TERM

a minus (-) before a search term will exclude any pages containing that term from the results.

regex:TERM

treated as a regular expression. MoinMoin follows Python regex rules (see http://docs.python.org/lib/re-syntax.html for more info)

title:TERM

searches in pages whose titles match TERM.
Normal search terms do search the titles, too. Matches in titles get more weight than matches in pages.

case:TERM

searches case sensitive.

linkto:TERM

searches for links to TERM.

language:LANG-ISO-CODE

searches for pages written in a given language ISO code, e.g. en, de

category:CategorySomething

searches for pages belonging to CategorySomething

mimetype:TYPE

searches for pages and attachments with mimetype TYPE, e.g. image/png
/!\ mimetype: search has limited support for the builtin search (only pages have a mimetype - text/<format>)

domain:TERM

searches for pages in a domain like underlay or system (for system pages)

no_highlight:TERM

suppresses highlighting of TERM on pages linked from search results.

title:, regex:, linkto: and case:

May be used in combination in one search term.
These modifiers may be abbreviated to any length: e.g. re:, t:, reg:, cas:, l:
If you want to use multiple prefixes, you have to concatenate them like this: t:re:TERM
If used, the - must be put before any other modifiers

OR

operator has a lower precedence than the implicit AND (e.g., car diesel or gas will find any page containing both "car" and "diesel", but will also hit on pages containing "gas", even if "car" is not on the page.)

( and )

Parentheses can be used for grouping.

Examples

Example

Description

title:Help macro

searches for help pages that contain the word "macro".

apple (computer or "operating system")

searches for pages containing the word "apple" and at least one of "computer" or "operating system".

windows winamp or linux xmms

searches for pages containing both "windows" and "winamp", and also for pages containing both "linux" and "xmms".

"is text"

Will match both "this text" and "is texts". Quotes are used only to include whitespace.

linkto:WindowsPage title:Linux

searches for pages that have "Linux" in the page name and that link to WindowsPage

r:\bdog\b

searches for the word "dog" and will not find the word "doggy".

help -domain:system

search for pages containing the word "help" but which are not system pages

category:CategoryHomepage title:thomas

search for pages in CategoryHomepage with the word "thomas" in the title (user homepages of all persons named Thomas)

Xapian

Xapian is an optional indexing search engine that indexes your wiki for much faster searching performance.

See HelpOnXapian for more information on Xapian and its setup.