Searching multiple files for a simple letter string

1. Open BBEdit Lite 4.0. An initial untitled window will open.
2. To begin a CHILDES search, open the Find dialog (Search>File).
3. Let's suppose you want to search for every occasion that Adam (one of the most widely studied children in Roger Brown's corpus) says the word "did". Enter this string in the "Search For" box, check the box "Multi-File Search" and then click on the "Folder:" menu to select the folder that you want to search.
4. Find your way to the folder you're interested (for example, the Adam files are at DATABASE>ENGLISH>BROWN>ADAM) and click on the "Select" button at the bottom of the dialog to choose the folder you want to search.
5. The "Folder:" menu should now display the name of the folder you want to search. Now just click on "Find All" and BBEdit will search for all occurrences of 'did' in the Adam corpus (spoken by anybody).
6. The results window is split into two panes. The upper window shows all lines that matched your search criteria.
7. The lower pane of the results window shows the context that the matching line appeared in. To display the context click on any line in the upper pane. (By the way, you can change the relative size of the two panes by using the mouse to drag the border between the panes up or down.)
8. The ability to display the context of a matching line is extremely useful if you are concerned about any of the following:
   a. What might this utterance mean?
   b. Is this utterance a repetition (of the speaker's own utterance, or of something somebody else said)?
   c. Are there any accompanying database notes about gestures, interpretations etc.?
9. If you want to see more context for an utterance than is displayed in the lower pane of the results window, then you can double click on the file icon at the left of the matching line, and the entire file (e.g. ADAM03.CHA in our example) will be opened in a separate BBEdit window.

This shows you how to conduct a basic search through multiple files and how to examine the context of an utterance. But you will probably want to do more than this. Notice that most of the matching lines in our example search consisted of adult utterances. To see how to begin to narrow your search go to using the results of a previous search or to searching for complex patterns using 'grep', or return to the main page.