Windows 7 came with a nifty feature called AQS which allowed users to search files and folders based upon rules and expressions.
This functionality was extended to Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, where the syntax and concept have remained intact.
Compared to regular expressions, AQS have yet to realise its "Advanced" claim, and should really fashion itself as the "Basic Query Syntax (BQS)".
Consider this scenario. I have a list of archives that I want to search through on my computer.
These archives have a specific naming structure, 01-01-01 Archive.rar, 02-01-01 Archive.rar, 03-01-01 Archive.rar... Basically following the pattern of "DD-MM-YY Name.rar"
With "AQS", you're allowed to use the AND and OR operators, where to achieve searching the said files, you could hypothetically do something like:
(0 or 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 or 9) and (0 or 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 or 9) * type:.rar
Well.. This worked in Windows 7. But, since Windows 8.1 is the trend now, I updated my computer and found out that it no longer worked.
The question to be asked. Is why is it so complicated to search numbers in the first place?
(0-9) and (0-9) * type:.rar[0-9] and [0-9] * type:.rartitle:(0-9) and (0-9) * type:.rartitle:[0-9] and [0-9] * type:.rar(0-9)(0-9) * type:.rar[0-9][0-9] * type:.rar(0-100) * type:.rar[0-100] * type:.rartitle:(0-100) * type:.rartitle:[0-100] * type:.rar
With regular expressions, the following works fine:
However, the same regular expression fails completely in Windows 8.1...
The best solution that I could come up to solve my problem was to use the following AQS query:
("00" OR "01" OR "02" OR "03" OR "04" OR "05" OR "06" OR "07" OR "08" OR "09" OR "10" OR "11" OR "12" OR "13" OR "14" OR "15" OR "16" OR "17" OR "18" OR "19" OR "20" OR "21" OR "22" OR "23" OR "24" OR "25" OR "26" OR "27" OR "28" OR "29" OR "30" OR "31")
Though, I guess when it comes down to it, this is just proof that the "Advanced Query Syntax" format is simply not powerful enough.
