Weird Results With A Negated Search

Question

I'm searching a folder of caret (^) delimited files looking for any file that contains no carets. No caret means it's in a different format that I need to investigate further or handle differently.

NOT ^ in the Containing text field works perfectly with Boolean, but not with Whole Word.

Can you explain the difference?

Answer 1

Whole word is specifically coded around the idea of a word, ie an alpha-numeric collection of symbols. The caret (^) symbol wouldn't be found as a 'word', so I suppose FileLocator Pro should actually provide a warning that the containing text wouldn't find anything.

If you did want to find a lone caret this should work in Boolean mode:

<^>