As far as I can tell, the plugins have no interaction whatsoever. Search Regex adds a new way to do a search in the WP admin, but does nothing to the front end search for users, right? Relevanssi on the other hand replaces the front end search and has a separate admin search.
Relevanssi doesn’t replace Search Regex, because Relevanssi has no regex or search and replace features. On the other hand, since Search Regex doesn’t do anything in the front end, it doesn’t replace Relevanssi. Search Regex doesn’t affect Relevanssi search.
Thread Starter
Anonymous User 17612203
(@anonymized-17612203)
Ok, looks like I have missunderstood Search Regex… What I would like to have in my frontend search (with relevancy) is the possibility to use basic regex like *, ?, and, or,… When I got you right this is not possible with Relevanssi, right?
No, it’s not possible with Relevanssi. Wildcards are on my to-do list as something to consider, but in most cases, they are just not particularly important.
Relevanssi does partial matching, which covers 99% of the use cases for wildcard matching – cases where a wildcard match is required inside a word are super rare, it’s hard to even come up with good examples where it would be useful. So in Relevanssi, you can search for “satur” and find all posts with Saturn, Saturday, saturation and so on.
Cases where proper regex matching with all the bells and whistles are required are a different thing altogether and something Relevanssi is never going to cover.
Thread Starter
Anonymous User 17612203
(@anonymized-17612203)
Lets asume the following search: Digital Marketing
1. Case: Relevanssi is (based on the settings) looking for Digital OR MArketing
2. Case: Relevanssi is (based on the settings) looking for Digital AND MArketing
But how about the following search? “Digital Marketing”
3. Case is looking for the exact string. This isn’t possible today, right?
Also the Regex + and – could be usefull. If the settings are set to OR, the + would wmake and AND out of it
* and ? I don’t see that important, but +, – and ” ” I also still use elsewhere like within Google. So why not in Relevanssi?
Ah, I thought you were talking about regex. The + and – operators are Boolean operators, not regex operators (well, + is, but it has a different meaning in regex).
Relevanssi, free and Premium, does support phrase searching, so searching for "digital marketing" will only show you results with that exact string.
Relevanssi Premium does include the + operator for forcing AND in an OR search and the – operator for NOT.
That said, the next version of Relevanssi Premium will also include support for * (zero or more characters) and ? (exactly one character) wildcard operators.
