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Forum Discussion
Search is returning more matches than expected
First of all, problem I'm trying to resolve is checking if folder exists anywhere on dropbox, without knowing it's exact path. Only endpoint I found that work without path or id is search.
According to documentation: The search string is split on spaces into multiple tokens. For file name searching, the last token is used for prefix matching (i.e. "bat c" matches "bat cave" but not "batman car").
I have folders called, i.e. "new company a", "new company b", , "new company c".
When I search for "new company b" I get both b and c (https://prnt.sc/m5jow1). Same when I search for "new company a", although I expect no matches for that.
Did I misunderstood something and this actually should work like this? Is there a way to perform more exact search?
Or, is there a better way to check if folder exists without knowing path?
Thanks
- Greg-DB
Dropbox Staff
There isn't a way to perform an exact string search, but I'll pass this along as a feature request. I also can't think of another workaround for finding an item of a particular name if you don't know the id or path unfortunately. (You could list everything using /2/files/list_folder[/continue] and filter client-side, but that would be relatively inefficient.)
As for the behavior you are seeing, I'll check with the team on this and then follow up here once I have an answer for you.
Thanks Greg; is there still no way to search for specific phrases?
I try not to be the "this can't be that hard" guy, but surely if the search function can do fuzzy matches it could also do exact ones.
- Greg-DB
Elliott C.1 No, unfortunately I don't have an update on this feature request.
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