Trouble trying to use Windows Search to search for file with a question mark in the content

It seems that Windows Search is having trouble when I specify a question mark character as the content that I’m searching for within my files.

I’ve tried:

• content:?
• content:”?”
• content:”?”
• content:?
• content:%3f
• content:”%3f”
• content:3f
• content:”3f”
• content:0003F

but each of these yield no results when I do indeed have files that contain ? within the scope of the search. If I instead search for something like content:happy it will indeed find all files with the phrase “happy” within those same files.

My assumption is that Windows Search is treating some characters such as the question mark as a special character likely for the purpose of wild card expressions. To test this theory I’ve also searched for files containing an asterisk * and indeed I have the same issue as when searching for content of question mark. What I’m wondering is whether there is any way to get a search to work where I can search for a literal expression without any type of wildcard matching or at least a way to escape the special characters within the expression.

By the way I’m using Windows 7 Enterprise.

Solution:

Try ~=? where ? is the character you are searching for.