Searching for Title Containing the character "

[glenm]

As the title says how do I search for a book title that contains the double quote character (i.e. ")
As a start entering one, two or three "'s in the search box doesn't work.
Using advanced search and entering " in the title box in the title/... tab search generates title:""" in the search box and returns nothing

Additionally how do I find books whose title starts with a "

All of the above functionality works with a single character like Z.

Thanks

[theducks]

you need to escape special characters

 \"

in your search

[glenm]

Thanks
Obviously from what you said regular expressions can be used in the Search Bar.
Using \" returns all books that contain a ", adding on to your reply if I used ^\" that should return books that start with "
That doesn't work so what should I use to get books that start with a " character?

[chaley]

Originally Posted by glenm

Thanks
Obviously from what you said regular expressions can be used in the Search Bar.
Using \" returns all books that contain a ", adding on to your reply if I used ^\" that should return books that start with "
That doesn't work so what should I use to get books that start with a " character?

Regular expressions can be used in searches, but they are not the default. I suggest you look at the calibre documentation The search interface.

To quote the relevant part of that document:

Searches are by default ‘contains’. An item matches if the search string appears anywhere in the indicated metadata. Two other kinds of searches are available: equality search and search using regular expressions.

Equality searches are indicated by prefixing the search string with an equals sign (=). For example, the query tag:"=science" will match “science”, but not “science fiction” or “hard science”. Regular expression searches are indicated by prefixing the search string with a tilde (~). Any Python-compatible regular expression can be used. Note that backslashes used to escape special characters in regular expressions must be doubled because single backslashes will be removed during query parsing. For example, to match a literal parenthesis you must enter \\(. Regular expression searches are ‘contains’ searches unless the expression contains anchors.

The search you are looking for is

title:"~^\""