After the Search is completed, ELAN displays the following search results:
The number of annotations where the search item was found.
The full content of each annotation where the search item was found.
The begin, end time and duration of each annotation where the search item was found. To see more information per match, right click in the results and check the other desired fields (file – tier – before – after ).
When performing multiple search actions one after another, a search history is created. With this feature it becomes possible to browse through all the entered queries:
Enter a query and click OK to activate it.
Click on the New Query icon
Enter another query and choose OK
Now you can use the back and forward icons to browse through the search history.
When closing the search dialog, the query history is removed. If nonetheless you want to save a certain search command, have a look at the section called “Saving and loading queries”.
After a search operation, one can perform another search within the results of the previous action. To achieve this, select
from the menu in the Search dialog window. This will get you the following window:
By specifying extra search constraints, you can narrow down the results. This
is similar to the addition of an extra search constraint.
When using complex queries, or one is repeating the same search on annotation files, it is convenient to reuse a query. This is possible in ELAN thanks to the save and load query functionality.
Specify a query in the search dialog
Either choose
or click on the save icon in the toolbar.Enter a filename for the active query.
Choose save.
Either choose
or click on the Open icon in the toolbar.Select an existing query from the file dialog.
Choose Open.
To export the results of a query to a tab-separated file, go through these steps:
In the query dialog, select
Specify a file name
Click on save
An exported file looks as follows:
If you right click in the table containing the search results, a popup menu
appears. Tick the checkboxes to show or hide columns that are related to the found
annotations. In the same popup menu you will find the option , which literally saves the displayed result table
to a text file, as shown in the example below.