Search question

[JimC1946]

In the book I'm reading on my K3, I tried searching for the word "it's." I got no returns, even though I know the word occurs several times. In the book, the apostrophe is curly, but the SYM table only shows a straight apostrophe. Is there any way to add a curly apostrophe in the search strring, or does the Kindle even care which it is?

In any case, I know the word occurs, but I'm not getting any hits.

Any help?


Thanks,
JimC

[SusanCassidy]

A couple of possible reasons.  The way that the apostrophe is encoded may make it hard to search for, and often in indexing schemes, small common words are not indexed.  There would be no point, for example, in indexing 'the'.  Too common to be a useful search item.  "It's" probably falls into that category, as well.

[Elk]

Interesting.

I ran a search and obtain many occurrences of "its," but none of "it's."  "The" also returns zero hits.

[Morf]

Very interesting!

The handling of apostrophes in searches is rather strange, in a book with "don't" in it, a search for:

don - found the word
dont - no hits
don't - no hits

So add that to the fact that "it" is not an indexed word ("its" is) and a search for "it's" is not going to get very far.

It's a shame its handling of it isn't better isn't it, don't they think it's worth it? 

[SusanCassidy]

The problem may be because curly quotes may be encoded via an HTML entity, which is ampersand, pound sign, 146, or a character that is not typeable with the SYM keys.

Words like "it's" are far too common to be of much use in a search, anyway.

[JimC1946]

Thanks, folks. I'm reading a book now, and the author apparently doesn't know the difference between "it's" and "its." I was trying to count the number of times that "it's" is used as a possessive pronoun.

[Elk]

I was trying to count the number of times that "it's" is used as a possessive pronoun.

How many hits do you get when you search for OCD? 

[JimC1946]

How many hits do you get when you search for OCD? 

Oh no, you just pushed one of my HOT buttons. 

[DreamWeaver]

Oh no, you just pushed one of my HOT buttons. 

Jim, it's/its is one of my pet peeves too.  I have many. 

Yesterday, I was searching for a similar common word (with apostrophe) in the Kindle version of my husband's book.  It didn't show up, and I thought that was because I had encoded the apostrophe as ’ (curly single quotation mark) in the HTML.  But then I searched for the same word in another book (that has straight single quotation marks) and it didn't show up there either.  I was confused by those results.  Thanks for asking the question!