Negate tag in search

[Irregular]

Hi all,

I make use of a @nextaction(date) tag, e.g. @nextaction(2019-05-04).

I’m trying to work out how to search for all task that don’t have a @nextaction tag assigned, but I’m having some trouble working out the syntax. ’ not @nextaction ’ doesn’t seem to work.

Anybody got some pointers please?

Thanks in advance,

Dave

[Jim]

Maybe: //not @nextaction

[Irregular]

Hi,

This seem to give the same result as the ’ not @nextaction ’ query.

I’ve done a little more testing, and @nextaction tags without dates are not being displayed, which is the expected behaviour. I suspect that it is the brackets and date that are not matching the query.

Does anybody know if there is any wildcard characters (* or ?) in the search query syntax that would work here?

Thanks in advance.

[jessegrosjean]

I don’t think the associated date value should make a difference. Instead it might be just that in your particular document the ones with a date are in a different context (ie they have child items)

Please try:

not @nextaction except @nextaction///*

More discussion on what the above search is doing can be found here:

@done tag not filtered as expected

Sorry I missed this thread earlier. First the reason this happens is because when TaskPaper does a search it: Finds all the matches Inserts any missing ancestors from the match set The reason that it does this second step is so that matches have some context. So “Review vent diameter” is shown because “Phone cons with jon” is “not @done”. The good news is that you can solve this by using search set operations. What we’ll do is take the original search, and then remove the descendants of all…

[Irregular]

Hi Jesse,

That works perfectly…thanks.

Now I have to get my head around “why”. Back to the documentation, I think.

Cheers.