Title: query syntax?
Last modified: August 21, 2016

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# query syntax?

 *  [MikeShand](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mikeshand/)
 * (@mikeshand)
 * [12 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/query-syntax/)
 * What is the syntax of the query string? As far as I can tell it ignores non-alphabetics,
   and performs an OR on two, but not three words (e.g. “string1 string2” seems 
   to find events containing string1 or string2). But it’s kind of hard to figure
   out just by trying various things.
 * So what CAN we put in the query string? e.g. I’d like to query for string1 OR
   string2 OR string3
 * can it be a regexp is some format?
 * [http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-calendar-events/](http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-calendar-events/)

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

 *  Plugin Contributor [Ross Hanney](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rosshanney/)
 * (@rosshanney)
 * [12 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/query-syntax/#post-3968837)
 * Mike,
 * Are you referring to the “Search query” option in the development version of 
   the plugin?
 * If so, the documentation on what is / isn’t supported can be found in [this table](https://developers.google.com/gdata/docs/2.0/reference#alt)(
   under “q”). Basically though, OR and regular expressions won’t work.
 * You could sort of emulate OR by using a different feed in the plugin for each
   search term. So feed 1 would have a search query of “string 1”, feed 2 would 
   have “string 2” and so on. Not a particularly elegant solution, though.
 *  Thread Starter [MikeShand](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mikeshand/)
 * (@mikeshand)
 * [12 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/query-syntax/#post-3968839)
 * Ross,
    Thanks. I couldn’t get that syntax to work though. I found by experiment
   that ‘”word1+word2″‘ would search for an exact match of a string containing a
   space. I couldn’t get “word1 word2” to work.
 * Is there some munging that happens when the string given to the plugin is encoded
   in the q=
 * I assume it uses some URLencoding.
 *  Plugin Contributor [Ross Hanney](https://wordpress.org/support/users/rosshanney/)
 * (@rosshanney)
 * [12 years, 10 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/query-syntax/#post-3968849)
 * Mike,
 * Yeah, the URL encoding might be interfering. I’ll need to look into it further.
 *  Thread Starter [MikeShand](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mikeshand/)
 * (@mikeshand)
 * [12 years, 3 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/query-syntax/#post-3968940)
 * Hmmm. Something suddenly changed (presumably the google API) and the ‘”word1+
   word2″‘ trick to search for a string containing a space no longer works. Anyone
   got any ideas?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

The topic ‘query syntax?’ is closed to new replies.

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## Tags

 * [query](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/query/)

 * 4 replies
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [MikeShand](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mikeshand/)
 * Last activity: [12 years, 3 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/query-syntax/#post-3968940)
 * Status: not resolved