How to search for literal text in Agent Ransack

Question

Is there a way to avoid both boolean and regular expressions and simply search for a literal string exactly as I enter it? For instance, while in Boolean mode I searched for:
return ""

and found all instances of the word 'return' were highlighted, as the following quote marks were considered to be boolean syntax. Now, this particular search I could run in regex mode, but I'd rather not have to think about what I might need to escape as a regex.

Answer 1

There is no separate 'Plain text' literal search type in Agent Ransack. Most of the time you can specify literal text in Boolean by enclosing the text in quotes, e.g.

"return getText()"

But if you want to search for quotes then you need to escape those, e.g.

"return \"\""

Quotes are the only characters that need escaping inside a quoted string.

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If you don't want to bother with escaping quotes and really need a Plain Text option then you should consider FileLocator Pro which has more Expression Type options.