Basic Catalog Search Help
This basic service allows one to do simple searches in the Serpentine Music catalog. To start a search, type in a keyword and click on the search button. Note that spaces count as part of the keyword, so Samhain magic will match only Samhain magic, but not magic of Samhain. Also note that the keyword does partial matches, so if you are not sure how to spell a name like Gwydion Pendderwen, putting in Gwy will find Gwydion.
By default, any entry that contains the keyword in any one of the fields will be found. It is possible to narrow down the search a little more by selecting a field within the entries in the pop-up menu. The search will then be restricted to that field only.
More Help
The search engine for this service was built using
Perl.
The keyword entered is interpreted as a
regular
expression.
Thus, all the clever tricks one can play still work.
Generally speaking, a regular expression is a search pattern that is used to
find things. Usually, it simply consists of a string of characters that one
wants to find. So, for example,
McKennitt
will find all occurences of the word McKennitt. However,
there are some characters with special meaning. The period (.)
matches any character. If you type in
.eading
you will get
-
beading
-
heading
-
leading
-
reading
- but also
aeading, ceading, etc.
This may not be what you want. You can make the search more specific by listing the set of possible characters within brackets. For example:
[rh]eading
will only match reading and heading. This mechanism is quite powerful and also allows you to specify ranges:
[b-h]eading
matches beading, ceading, up to
heading. If the first character in the brackets is the caret
(^), the match is reversed, i.e., it matches everything
except the characters listed.
If you want a character to occur multiple times, there are several ways to do
that. They all work by appending something to the character in question. You
have the following choices:
-
*
- matches 0 or more occurences of that character.
-
+
- matches 1 or more occurences of that character.
-
?
- matches 0 or 1 occurences of that character.
-
{min,max}
- matches at least min and at most max occurences
of that character, where min and max are numbers.
Probably the most common use for these postfixes are partial matches:
danc.*
matches anything that starts
with danc, such as dances or dancing because
.* matches any number of any character.
Other uses might be for names where the exact spelling is not clear:
McKen?itt
will match both McKenitt and McKennitt. .
It is not only possible to list several alternatives for characters, one can
also list several possible strings to match:
(folk|rock) music
will match both folk music and rock music.
If you wish to browse the catalog by category, try the following keywords:
Catalog Search Keywords
Acoustic
Ballad
Books
Celtic
Chant
Children
Dance Music
Devotional
Ethnic
Folk
Instrumental
Pagan Rock
Spoken Word
Video
