2.5 Searching for special characters

There are some characters contained within trade marks that are not “ordinary” Roman letters. Many of these characters can be searched on the website.

Characters such as an equal sign (=), full stop (.) and quotes (" and ') can be searched by inserting a backslash (\) before that character in the search string. Other characters can be searched without these provisions. See examples below.

Note that regular wildcards can still be used with most of these characters.

• is a “multi-character” wildcard. This will finds entries that contain one or more characters in the place of the wildcard. If it is used after a word, * will find the word on its own as well as the word plus extra characters. For example, a search for rose* finds “rose”, “Roseanne” and “rose bowl” if they are listed as trade marks.
• ? is a single character wildcard. This will finds any entries that contain just one character in the place of the wildcard unless it’s used with a * wildcard. Can be used in any location within the word. For instance, a search for “str?ng” would find “strung”, “string”, “strang” and “strong”.

Important Notes:

• When searching for numbers, wildcards will not work.
• A space is counted as a character, so a search for ‘2 4’ will NOT find ‘24’, but will find ‘2 4’. A search for ‘P O’ will NOT find PO but will find ‘P O’.
• Where a “\” precedes a special character and the wildcards ?* are not used before the \, then the query says that the special character is the BEGINNING of the entire word or phrase you are searching for– just like an ordinary search. E.g. a search for \.com* is a query for any trade mark starting consisting of “.com” plus anything on the end of “.com”. A search for ?*\.com* is a query for any trade mark containing the text “.com”, as long as there is additional information before the “.com” text.