See also on this page:

• searching for exact phrases with quotation marks,
• finding complete words,
• using wildcards, and
• finding words with ligatures and accents
• searching All Books or Books not in the drop-down list
• creating Custom Lists of books to search

Case-insensitive searches are the default and are recommended unless you are searching for a proper noun. Select Case-sensitive only if you are sure about the case of your search terms.

The chapter links before each paragraph may be clicked to go to the indicated chapter and for full function and display of the text and its links and graphics. The reported paragraph numbers can be used to find the exact paragraph in context within the chapter.

Links such as those to footnotes or graphic/images, embedded within paragraphs, may not function directly from the Search Results page. Please go to the chapter in the book itself to pursue those links. Links, image files, and other occasional graphic elements are suppressed on the Search Results pages for efficiency and speed; but we have tried to preserve for our users an indication of what is available from the original text. Please go to the chapter in the book itself to enable any links to footnotes, to see any figures, or to see any tables, chapter and section headings, or further links.

Chapters are searched in order, followed by any appendices, glossaries, and the footnote file for the book.

Search Results do not replace each other in the browser history file. Thus, if you perform a sequence of searches, you can use your browser's Back button to return through the entire sequence. Opening the Search Form in a separate browser window with the book itself open in its own window, is an alternative option for interspersing searches with checks of the actual book.

Punctuation. Except for quotation marks ("), punctuation can almost always be used within Book searches in the ordinary ways it is used in the text. You may thus search for terms that include periods, exclamation points, question marks, hyphens, parentheses, apostrophes, single quotes, colons, semicolons, or asterisks. The apostrophe, single left quote (`), and single right quote (') are interchangeable and are occasionally switched by the software on the Search Report page.

A few kinds of punctuation and special characters may produce unexpected or incorrect results. Notably, quotation marks (") and hash marks (#) have special uses described below, so you are not able to search directly for these characters in the text.
The common m-dash (—) can be found only by searching for the unusual combination —, which is a constraint of HTML (and yes, you need the ampersand, the pound sign, and the final semicolon, with no intermediate spaces). We have rendered n-dashes as ordinary hyphens in all books—just use an ordinary keyboard hyphen, -, for an n-dash. For more on searching for unusual characters and punctuation, please see ASCII/HTML Conversion Table and ligatures and accents below.

Logical and/or: The (recommended) default for multiple terms is "and," which finds paragraphs that include all the chosen terms. Searching for comparative advantage using logical "and" will find all paragraphs containing both the word comparative and the word advantage, though not necessarily in that order. To search with a logical "or," select the radio button labeled "any of the above terms." Searching for comparative advantage using the logical "or" will result in all paragraphs containing either comparative or advantage (or both).

N.B. You cannot successfully use the Boolean logic terms "or" or "not" between keywords when doing a Book Search. All terms on either side of the "or" or "not" will still be searched for, in addition to the terms "or" or "not" themselves! Select the appropriate radio button instead.

Exact phrases with quotation marks. Quotation marks may be used to surround exact phrases. Thus, searching for "comparative advantage" finds comparative advantage, but not "comparatively advantageous" because of the intervening "ly". Quotation marks will find phrases where the entire phrase is in a different font (e.g., italics), but not those where there is a font-change within the phrase. Exact phrases override the logical "and/or" choice; however, you may still select case-sensitivity or non-case-sensitivity for the words in the phrase. Exact phrases are very demanding about spaces, and thus can be used to search for complete words. That is, "comparative " (note the space before the final quotation mark) will find comparative but not "comparative." or "comparatively" because the period and "l" differ from a space. (See complete words for more information and ideas.)

Should I use logical "and" or an exact phrase? In most cases, logical "and" is the best choice. Unlike most page-oriented search software, this search tool operates on paragraphs. The close proximity of terms within a paragraph, as opposed to across an entire page, makes for very accurate searches using the logical "and" without losing desired matches that would not be found using quotation marks for exact phrases. The "and" option of this search software will find all paragraphs containing the exact phrase comparative advantage even if that phrase contains font or emphasis changes mid-phrase (e.g., comparative advantage), which will not be found by using quotation-marks. In addition, it will find automatically such variations as when the phrase contains minor changes in word-endings, like comparatively advantageous or definitions or other inversions such as: "advantage is said to be comparative when...". The focus on paragraphs, coupled with using a logical "and," automatically excludes instances where the word "comparative" appears in one part of a long page while the word "advantage" appears only many paragraphs later.

Complete Words. To search for complete words (that is, to find the word "war" but not "towards" or "warlike"), you can enclose the word in quotation marks with surrounding spaces within the quotes (e.g., "  war  ").

Tip for advanced users: The most reliable way to search for a complete word is to use the Perl regex metasymbol for word boundaries, \b. Thus, to find the word "war" even if it is followed by a period, comma, etc., search for \bwar\b. To find the words "bound" and "boundary" but not "unbound", search for \bbound.
N.B. The Book Search tool is a Perl-based program. I've had to override a few standard Perl regex syntax items because of the particular circumstances and goals of working with books, which contain actual periods, question marks, dollar signs, asterisks, etc. See wildcards for an example of how the most common of these punctuation marks are handled. But if you are a Perl expert and have a particular Perl metasymbol in mind, very likely it's valid and going to work as expected. Go ahead and try it! And: please let me know if something didn't work! If you tried it, someone else will try it, too.

Wildcards. The hash mark (also called the pound or sharp), #, is a wildcard standing for exactly one character when searching the text of a book to display paragraphs. The combination #! is a wildcard standing for any number of characters, including none at all, between the surrounding characters.

Examples:
• You do not need wildcards at the ends of words to find alternate endings. The word time will also find timely and time-keeper (but not timorous). (See also: finding complete words.)
• The combination s#!n matches with sun, soon, and surprising. It also matches with snack, "does not", and "should they be going?", etc.
• The combination s##n matches with soon, sown, "so none", "man's. Nothing", or monsoon but not "snack" or "surprising" (because there are not exactly two characters between the "s" and the "n").

TRICK FOR ADVANCED USERS: Wildcards can be used successfully to search for complete phrases. E.g., comparative#advantage or comp#!age each find paragraphs with "comparative advantage" without finding those that have "advantage that is comparative". It saves typing to use comp#!age, but might also result in extraneous matches that are unexpected, such as "comparing the ages of the individuals," hyphenated terms, or terms that have digits instead of spaces separating them.

Tech Tips:

• A space between words counts as exactly one character. Multiple consecutive spaces that happen to be typed into a file (say, after a period), or any number of equivalent characters (say, because the browser treats a carriage return as a word-space), all count as exactly one space character. In other words: What you think of as a space between words is the equivalent of one space, or one character. Use the space character as you would normally: as a keyboard character in a direct quote, or use one # as a wildcard to represent any between-word space.
• Why not use the familiar asterisk * for a wildcard? We don't use an asterisk for a wildcard in the Book Search tool because asterisks indicate footnotes in most texts. Footnotes call-outs can be found by searching for those asterisks. Asterisks are used as wildcards in the overall Site Search and Card Catalog Search tools, though.

Special characters, ligatures, and accents. Most accented characters and ligatures can be found by searching for their most common English equivalent. (That is, to find any of
àáâãäåÀÁÂÃÄÅèéêëÈÉÊËìíîïÌÍÎÏòóôõöÒÓÔÕÖùúûüÙÚÛÜçÇñÑ, search for
aaaaaaAAAAAAeeeeEEEEiiiiIIIIoooooOOOOOuuuuUUUUcCnN;
to find æÆœŒ search for ae, AE, oe, OE, or sometimes just e).

You can also paste any of these ligatured or accented characters directly into the Search Form. Other special characters can also be copied and pasted into the search form as follows: £§ÐØŠÝŸÞðøšßýþÿ.

Note: In your Search Results, accented characters and ligatures will appear without their accents or diacritical marks. However, when you go to the original book page, the accents, ligatures, and marks will be present as per the original.

Wildcards can also be used effectively to search for words with any of these special characters. For example, #uvres matches with œuvres, Œuvres, and Oeuvres.

A few special characters (e.g., case fractions like ½ and m-dashes like —) are searchable only by searching for their underlying HTML or ASCII codes. Although we've tried to be consistent, there is occasional variation from book to book on this website, and you might find what you are looking for by trying each of the various alternatives shown in the ASCII/HTML Conversion Table.

Tech Tip: The Book Search engine internally converts most ligatures and special characters, both in the text and in your search terms, to their English equivalents before doing the search. HTML entities, however, are not converted.

Searching All Books, searching Books Not in the Drop-down List, and creating Custom Lists of Books. Selecting All Books or Search a Book Not in List takes you first to the Card Catalog, which performs a keyword search and identifies all books on Econlib with occurrences of your search terms (using the syntax and search rules of Card Catalog searches). When that search is complete, you can return to the Book Search by clicking the Search Book button for that item. If several books are returned, you will also be offered the option to search a custom list of up to 30 books by clicking the Search All Listed Books button. Once you've clicked that button, each of those thirty books will be listed in the Drop-down list of the Book Search Results page you generate.

If the Card Catalog list is longer than 30 items, the custom list of books you search will be truncated. By sorting your list in various ways, you can change the order of your list. Refining your search terms or the fields you are searching may also directly reduce the size of the list and avoid truncation.
TRICK FOR VERY ADVANCED USERS: You can further reorder, reduce, or change the custom list of books you search with the following technique. After clicking Search All Listed Books button, the location window of your browser will contain a list of the "idcodes" for those books. You can directly delete, reorder, or add more (if you happen to know them from past experience). Example: Locate the section in the location window that begins with "book=" and ends with the next ampersand, as in this three-book example: "book=jsyStt+buchCv9+ricP&". In this example, the three books to be searched are Jasay's The State, the ninth volume of Buchanan's Collected Works, and Ricardo's Principles. The idcodes are, respectively, jsyStt, buchCv9, and ricP. Different books in the list are separated by plus signs. By cutting and pasting, you can eliminate books from the list, or change the order to search Ricardo first: "book=ricP+jsyStt+buchCv9&". If you've searched Marshall's Principles before and you know the idcode is marP, you can add it to the list in any position you like: "book=jsyStt+buchCv9+marP+ricP&". (Case matters in idcodes.) Be careful about the plus signs, don't delete the final ampersand, and don't insert any spaces!

If you want to search for something using syntax or choices specific to the Book Search tool, you may have to wait to do so till after you have selected the specific book or custom list of books in the Card Catalog.

Example: searching All Books with a case-sensitive search for Say first takes you to the Card Catalog and performs a case-insensitive keyword search (because case-sensitivity is not an option in Card Catalog searches). However, after you click the Search All Listed Books button, you will be returned to the Book Search, where you will be able to specify a case-sensitive search. Creative search terms and choices in the Card Catalog will limit the number of books and simplify this process. (In this example, try searching the Card Catalog for the keywords "Jean-Baptiste Say", click the Search All Listed Books button, and then search the custom list generated, case-sensitive, for Say.)

Another example: Punctuation may be unexpectedly persnickety when going back and forth between the Card Catalog and Book Search tools. For example, compare searching All Books (or Search a Book Not in List) for Montesquieu's versus "Montesquieu's" [with quotes] versus Montesquieu. Depending on your goals, you may have to try out several ideas. Creativity is the heart of research!

See also the Help page for why search terms may sometimes not be found as expected.

Searching specific chapters. You can limit your search to specific chapters or parts of a book with the following

TRICK FOR ADVANCED USERS: Using logical and (the default), type in both your search term and the chapter number followed by a period. Examples: to find all occurrences of "South Sea" in Chapter 2 of Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions, select Mackay and search for South Sea 2.. To find all occurrences of "money" in Book II, Chapter II of Smith's Wealth of Nations, type in money II.2.. To find all occurrences in Book II, type in money II.. (Note that for some books, roman numerals may have to be used for chapter or section numbers, while in others, roman numerals have been converted. Trial and error, or first examining the way the book's paragraphs are numbered are recommended solutions.) This trick works because every paragraph is numbered with a reference to the book's Chapter number (or Part and Chapter number); however, a search within Chapter 6 might also retrieve material within Chapter 16. While these searches may result in some extra paragraphs from other parts or chapters, limiting searches by chapters can ease searches for common words.

Occasional missing graphics, extraneous non-paragraph items such as navigation bars or section headings, or unexpected formatting (nested indentation or ongoing bold or italic fonts) may appear on the Search Results page depending on details of the search. These graphics, font changes, headings, bars, or other formatting oddities do not mean anything is amiss in your search! The Book Search software is designed to report all possible occurrences of your search terms, missing nothing rather than trying to second-guess your goals. On rare occasions that makes for some extraneous results which may have unexpected effects on the visual look of the Results page. Just click the link you want and go to the book itself for the correct formatting. See also: very short words.

Occasional search terms may result in extra paragraphs that do not appear to contain the term for which you are searching. This does not mean anything was amiss; all occurrences of the terms you searched for will still be reported to you as well. Extra paragraphs might occur:

• If your search term coincidentally appears in the underlying HTML/Javascript code for the page and has not specifically been handled as a common exception in the search software, or
• If what appears to be a paragraph is not actually a complete paragraph in the text of the book, but an ongoing portion of a multi-part paragraph that does contain your search term,
• If the word you are searching for appears in a chapter or section title, in which case sometimes case-sensitivity choices are overridden, or
• Some famous paragraphs are internally "tagged" with modern vocabulary equivalents that the author may not have used himself. The Book Search tool finds these tags. Example: Try searching Ricardo for "comparative advantage".

Very short words. Although it is not recommended unless you have some specific goal in mind, you can search for any word with the Book Search tool, even a word of just one letter. The results of searching for very short words, however, will probably surprise you and will be full of unexpected hits because the Book Search tool checks the underlying HTML code as well as the visible browser text. (The limit is 200 hits, so your search will not go on for hours.) Although the results may have strange codes or erratic formatting, the results will still be complete. If you are searching for an exact phrase, put your phrase in quotation marks. One-letter words in exact phrases are usually less prone to bringing up unexpected results. (Experiment for the hale: Try searching a book sequentially for a, and then for "a" as an exact phrase, if you are in the mood to compare what happens. Compare those to searching for "a " [note the space before the close-quote] and " a " [surrounding spaces] for fuller tests.)

The Search Form may be opened in various ways: from the Books page, or from the buttons at the page tops of books, or from the Table of Contents of any of the books on this website. The alternative formats allow you to choose a customized style to suit your work habits and preferences about frames.

• If you open the Search Form from the Books page, you will not be in a frame when you click chapter links, and the pull-out Table of Contents window will not automatically be available when you click a chapter from the Search Results page. This is an ideal method to find quickly some specific text in a specific book. A drawback for some users is that if you find what you want, it is not in a frame with the pull-out Table of Contents on the right, so moving around further in the book may take a few extra steps.
• If you open the Search Form from the button on the top of any book page, the Search Form will open in a new window. Repositioning and resizing that window can make it easy to do repeated searches without losing your original place. Links to chapters from the Search Results will open in the new window, leaving your original page untouched. This is the preferred option by many experienced users; however, it does open another window, which is an annoyance for some users.
• If you open the Search Form from the right-hand Table of Contents in the frame of a particular book, the Table of Contents will remain in the right-hand pull-out window, and the Search Form and any links you click from the results of a search will appear in the main window. This is an ideal method to move around quickly in a book without opening any additional windows. You can use the browser's Back button to return to your place after your search.

Finding your place. A quick way to find your place again if you have to stop reading a book is to paste a note in the Notepad with the paragraph number of the paragraph you were reading exactly as it appears in the margin of the book. When you return to reading you can search for the paragraph number and click the link to that paragraph. For example, searching for 6.8 in Ricardo's Principles will get you a direct link to Chapter 6, paragraph 8. An alternative is to paste a series of five or six words from the chapter, and later search for them as an exact phrase by surrounding them with quotation marks.

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