Searching Help and Documentation Content
After you open The Help Window and Topic-Based Help, click the Search button () to open the search engine and search the HTML content. Search results are shown sorted by product. You can also search in the contents of The Documentation Window.
Searching the Documentation
On the Documentation window, you can adjust the Search scope (see Figure 1-1). Enter a search term in the Search expression field and then select All documents, Selected only, or Application libraries from the list to narrow or expand the search scope as needed. For Selected only (Figure 1-3), first click a branch in the tree (for example, COMSOL Multiphysics Reference Manual) and then the search includes all the documents below the selected node until the beginning of the next branch. In this example it searches until the end of the Troubleshooting License Errors section.
The first search can take a couple of minutes while the search index is generated.
Figure 1-3: When searching in the Documentation window, choose a Search scope to search only a selected portion of the documentation, all the documentation, or only the Application Libraries.
Search Parameters for Help and the Documentation
Some examples of search parameters you can use:
Table 1-2: Search Parameters for the COMSOL Help System
operator
Example
Search result example
&&, AND
block && cone
block AND cone
Results include all instances of the words.
OR, ||
block OR cone
block || cone
Results include any of the listed words.
+, −
+block −cone
Search for one term (+block) but not the other term (−cone).
“, ~
“plot line”~10
Search for the words enclosed in the quotation marks (plot line) within (~) a certain number of words (10) from each other.
~
excentric~
Search for something “almost” spelled in a particular way (an approximate matching or fuzzy search). For example, excentric~. The results include eccentric cone.
?
h?t
Use in a search query to mean exactly one character. For example, search for all instances of hat, hit, or hut where ? represents a, i, or u, or any other letter between h and t.
*
strain*
strain*d
The asterisk (*) is a wildcard character. Search for any word that starts with “strain”. Results include strain-based, strain-rate, or strain, for example. The asterisk represents any number of characters.
If the asterisk is used in the middle of the word, it searches for one letter between “n” and “d”. The result in this example is strained.
You can use the asterisk before and after the word in order to search for it in the middle of a longer word or expression, For example, *setdefaultgeometry* finds ModelUtil.setDefaultGeometryKernel.
enclosed quotation marks “ ”
“time dependent study”
Use quotation marks around a text string to search for exactly that phrase; that is, to search for the words in the order given within the quotation marks.
Greek letters
 σ
You can also search for Greek letters. The search is case insensitive.