Questions:
How do you search for non-alphanumeric characters when using Google?
Why doesn't Google always interpret strings enclosed within double-quotes literally?
What is Google's escape character e.g. how would I search for something that contains a double-quote?
Backgound:
I am currently learning Grails. I was reading Mastering Grails: Grails services and Google Maps (which is very good tutorial series BTW) when I came across the following line of code:
def result = [:]
By looking at the surrounding code it seems like result is defined to be some kind of map, but I wanted more information on what precisely "=[:]" does.
How do you Google something like this?
I tried searching for:
grails "[:]"
but this returns the same result set as searching for "grails".
That happens because searching just for:
"[:]"
does not return any results.
Thanks for your time!
[:] is an empty map in Groovy
You can learn more about maps and collections here or focus on Groovy maps.
I think you are assuming that Google is going to do a simple 'grep' where their infrastructure is more setup to search based on a linguistic model.
You might try Google Codesearch
I would encourage you to pull up the Groovy Console (groovyConsole on the command-line if you have groovy setup) and play around with maps and lists to get the hang of it.