Exact Phrases

Surround multiple words with double quotes to require a match on that phrase, eg "bat route" malham

Route-star ranges

Asterisks get special treatment in search queries. A sequence of them is considered to be a star rating for a route, so * is treated as 1-star, ** treated as 2-stars and *** treated as 3-stars. Typing just one sequence creates a search where the route is required to have at least that many stars, eg bat route ** will only return routes with 2 or more stars that also match the other search criteria bat and route.
Adding a dash and a second star sequence will create a range, eg *-** means "match routes with at least one and at most two stars".

Grade ranges

As above with stars, but with grades. Eg vs-e1 will match routes with a grade of either VS, HVS or E1.

Date ranges (only years)

Date ranges will check against the first-ascent date field and require the route to have been put up between the start date and the end date (inclusive). Eg 1970-1974 will match routes put up between 01-01-1970 and 31-12-1974. You should note that not all routes have had the first ascent date filled in, and these routes will be excluded from any search that includes date ranges, so you might not get the results you expect.

Difficulty for grade

We've calculated a value based on the grade voting system that assigns a route a value from one of:

• soft
• benchmark
• hard

You can search for routes with these characteristics by using the special pipe-syntax, eg |soft|. If you don't wrap the text in pipes, you'll just be searching the other text fields, so soft, with no pipes, would get you a match if the text appeared in the description for example and |soft| will only match against routes that have been marked as soft, and not check the other fields for the text. A continuation of this system which uses the same syntax allows you to search for routes that are voted to be a completely different grade using the following criteria: eg |overgraded|. Note that this is based on votes, so if there are no votes for a route and you include one of these criteria it won't appear, regardless of whether it is in reality over or undergraded. Note also that whilst you can combine these with soft/benchmark/hard, some combinations make no sense.

Regular expressions

Regular expressions, for those that don't know, are a way of describing patterns in strings. They are a very powerful tool for searching and manipulating text, and completely unnecessary in this route search bar. However, if you do want to use them, they are possible by surrounding the expression with forward slashes, eg /chris (?!craggs)/ will match any routes that mention 'chris' but not those that mention 'chris craggs'. Or e2-e3 /crap|damp|horrible/ will return you a list of probably not classic routes. Note that pure-regex queries are not allowed due to the cost of the queries against the database. You should always add any of the other query types mentioned above if you're using a regex.

Negation

Finally, if you precede any text with a minus character you will negate it and require that it is not matched, eg -"mark leach" bat malham.