Full Text Search

[bluepeter]

Apologies if this is a silly question, but is there some way of of doing a full text search of only a limited selection of the books in my library?

Earlier today, I wanted to find a short section in a book that I read some time ago. I knew the author, and the incident involved cheese. Getting Calibre to do a full text search for cheese is simple, but approximately 60% of my books contain mentions of it. Obviously, I could (and did) sort my results by author, and find the passage I wanted by looking at the context. But it seems inefficient to ask Calibre to search thousands of books for references to cheese, when I know that I'm looking for is in one of a couple of dozen books.

Of course, I could have done it by an iterative process of opening each possible book in turn, and then searching them individually. But, even searching over 2500 books, Calibre can still do it more quickly.

[DNSB]

It's not a pretty procedure. First you have to select the books you want to search. In your case search by author would work. Then in the FTS search, check Restrict searched books and then do your search. You can also use a VL (a fancy search) to restrict the search.

A quick search on MobileRead came up with Full Text Search - Restrict Searched Books for an older message.

[bluepeter]

Ah, I see.

It's easy when you know how. I should remember it for next time.

Thank you very much.

[DNSB]

I have the same issue. I only use the limited FTS a couple of times per year and so end up having to relearn the procedure pretty much each time.

[BetterRed]

The VL from Selection plugin can be useful in this context.

It can be used to create a VL from an arbitrary set of books, which avoids having to concoct a category of some sort and then edit metadata to group the books into that category.

It creates a VL search term with the book ids e.g. "id:322 or id:1272 or id:2566 or id:3022 or id:3359".

BR

[DNSB]

I don't see much use for using the VL from Selection to generate the limited search for FTS. For the most part, I am searching an author or series or a search such as 'not series:"Cooking"'* and not a random selection of books. I generate the search and use that to create a VL and then search or I generate the search and search. The VL from selection would only be of use to me if I planned on going back to that search which I've never done on a FTS restricted search.

(*)I was searching for a phrase which turned out to be surprisingly popular in books about cooking.