In Search Of Brackets
Dec. 4th, 2010 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellow"How do you throw away a garbage can?"
In the course of constructing my library database, I ran into the problem of works having the same title, but by different authors. I dealt with this by attaching the author's name, in parentheses, after the title of the work. Recently, I decided that, since titles often contain parentheses, it would be safer to use square brackets instead of parentheses, thus: "Walden [Thoreau]".
My routines for manipulating records involve, among other things, searching for works by title. Unfortunately, in a Microsoft Access search, square brackets are special-purpose characters; a search for an entry with title "Walden [Thoreau]" will fail, even if there is an entry with that title. I am faced with the choice of either manually replacing every last square bracket ("Replace", let alone "Replace All", is impossible) or finding some way of getting Access to actually *find* square brackets. I've tried using an escape sequence, like "\[", to no avail. Does anyone know of an alternative?
In the course of constructing my library database, I ran into the problem of works having the same title, but by different authors. I dealt with this by attaching the author's name, in parentheses, after the title of the work. Recently, I decided that, since titles often contain parentheses, it would be safer to use square brackets instead of parentheses, thus: "Walden [Thoreau]".
My routines for manipulating records involve, among other things, searching for works by title. Unfortunately, in a Microsoft Access search, square brackets are special-purpose characters; a search for an entry with title "Walden [Thoreau]" will fail, even if there is an entry with that title. I am faced with the choice of either manually replacing every last square bracket ("Replace", let alone "Replace All", is impossible) or finding some way of getting Access to actually *find* square brackets. I've tried using an escape sequence, like "\[", to no avail. Does anyone know of an alternative?
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