Search Syntax and Tips

Find keywords in the documentation by entering text in the Search box on the desktop or in the Help browser.

When you view pages linked from the search results, search terms appear with highlights. To clear the highlights, press the Esc key.

The search engine ignores common, insignificant words such as a, an, the, and of, unless they are part of an exact phrase in quotation marks. It also ignores capitalization, punctuation, and special characters such as +. To find a symbol or special character:

  • Search for the word instead of the symbol or character, such as plus instead of +.

  • View the documentation on MATLAB Operators and Special Characters.

  • Search the PDF documentation, available from the documentation home page.

Searches can include the following operators:

""

Exact phrase

Example: "plot tools" finds pages that contain plot tools, in that sequence, with no words between them.

*

Wildcard

Requires at least two nonwildcard characters, and cannot appear at the start of a keyword or in an exact phrase.

Example: plot* finds plot, plot3, and plotting.

OR

Boolean OR

Example: plot OR graph finds pages with either plot or graph.

NOT

Boolean NOT

Example: "plot tools" NOT "time series" finds pages with plot tools but excludes pages with time series.

AND

Boolean AND

Implied when no operator is present between keywords.

Example: plot AND tools is equivalent to "plot" "tools".

The Help browser search evaluates NOT operators first, OR operators second, and AND operators last. For example,

"plotting tool" OR "plot tools" NOT "time series" AND workspace

finds pages that contain either plotting tool or plot tools and contain workspace, but do not contain time series.

You can filter search results using facets that appear on the left side of the page. For example, view MATLAB® topics by selecting MATLAB and Help Topics.

The search engine searches the following text in the documentation:

  • Documentation — Text and code shown in the Help browser

  • User interface examples — Help comments in the program file

  • Videos — Title

MATLAB Documentation

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