NEAR operator being ignored

Question

I performed the following search in FLPro (NEAR distance 1500):

transition NEAR vocational NEAR "higher education"

As seen in the screenshot:

Actually, the hits/results points to the three terms NEAR each other, but most of the hits/results points to the individual terms as "higher education" only, "transition" only, and "vocational".

I would expect in the search results only text in which, considering the NEAR distance of 1500 characters, the three searched terms are close each other.

Have a look at this example:

Hits split the terms, creating a bracket which includes just the term "transition" and another bracket duplicating lines and including "vocational" and "higher education". Why aren't the terms inside same bracket since the hit on Line 110 is NEAR enough to the two hits on Line 117? On the other hand, the results/hits are quite clear in the internal editor. I would say that hits presentation is causing confusion in my understanding of the results. Besides, in practical way, since lines are duplicated in hits and I exported hits results, my output has become a little messy.

Comments

Is that the source document or the results? Can you provide a more compact example of your issues with NEAR, a distance of 1500 makes evaluating your question difficult.

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I reduced the NEAR distance to 300 and performed the search again.
I recorded my screen commenting the problems I am facing using the NEAR operator, being the more severe when just a single term is highlighted in the hits.

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I think I understand your question have a look at the answer. For future questions please paste screenshots into the actual question so the question makes sense without external links.

Answer 1

By default the NEAR operator is not only matched on a single line, it spans multiple lines up to the maximum number of characters distance, e.g.

Line 100: Transition to College Literature in Sociology
Line 101: 
Line 102: Another source of controversy in sociologists’ understanding ...
Line 103: higher education and its relationship to vocational studies
etc.

This would match the expression because the hit on Line 100 is NEAR enough to the two hits on Line 103. However, if you only want the expression matched if the whole term is on a single line you can specify Line-by-line searching in the Options tab.

The brackets are used for showing the surrounding lines and in the current version of FLPro it's possible that they can overlap adjacent lines causing some confusion. This has been fixed for v8 as you can see in this screenshot:

As you can see expanding line 24 only expands UP because the line below, ie line 25, is already shown as a hit.

Comments

I am still not understating a specific behavior of the "hit tab" content presentation. I've updated the question.