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Help Searching the United States CodeOffice of the Law Revision Counsel |
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Any part of a search query may be keyed in either upper or lower case. Some of the following examples use upper case for readability only. |
Searching for a PhrasePut the phrase in single quotes, as in: 'unethical conduct' |
Boolean and Proximity Connectors
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Wildcards and Masks1. A question mark represents individual characters. For example, searching int??city will retrieve all occurrences of int, followed by two characters, followed by city (e.g., intercity and intracity). 2. An asterisk represents an unlimited number of characters. For example, searching int*city will retrieve all occurrences of int, followed by any number of characters, followed by city. 3. A dollar sign represents one or zero characters. For example, searching labo$r will retrieve both labor and labour. |
Searching by TopicAdd an exclamation mark after the name of the topic. For example, searching grapes! will retrieve all documents that relate to grapes (but do not necessarily use the word "grapes"). The computer will search for all occurrences of "grapes", look at what words occur near "grapes", look at how near they are to "grapes", look at how often they occur near "grapes" versus how often they appear throughout the Code, put all of this information through a formula that results in a list of words related to "grapes", search on those new words, and then rank the results in relevance order. |
Limiting Search to a Particular FieldThe documents in the Code database are divided into fields as shown in the table below. A search query can be constructed so that documents are found only if certain words appear in certain fields. To apply a field limiter to a single word, insert a colon and the field name after the word. For example, to retrieve documents containing 'wheat' in the STATUTE field, search: wheat:statute To apply a field limiter to an entire query, insert /F: and the field name after the query. For example, to retrieve documents containing 'short title' in the section heading, search: short adj title /f:head The following fields are available in the Code database:
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Unsearchable WordsThe following words cannot be searched:
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Executive Orders and Presidential ProclamationsTo find documents containing an executive order, enter EX W/2 ORD W/2 followed by a space, the executive order number, another space, and then /F:EXEC To find documents containing a presidential proclamation, enter PROC* W/2 followed by a space, the proclamation number, another space, and then /F:EXEC When the section of the Code containing the order or proclamation is found, use your browser to search within that section for the order or proclamation. |
Making a permanent link to a U.S. Code sectionTo make a permanent link to a U.S. Code section, insert the following code in your HTML, substituting the title number for title and the section number for section: <FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="http://uscode.house.gov/uscode-cgi/fastweb.exe?search"> If you were to substitute 39 for title and 3008 for section, the result will be:
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