Character Set and Indexing

The character set used for indexing and display of the DOSE data is ASCII. There are no foreign or accented characters in the data, save for Greek characters which are translated to their English word equivalents (alpha, beta, ALPHA, BETA and so on).

Note also that only the characters A-Z (the case of the character is ignored), 0-9, the hyphen, -, and - depending on the field - the full-stop, "." can be indexed by SPIRS. This means that when you search, omit any punctuation or other characters (except "/", "(" and ")" characters which should be replaced by a space) in the search phrase . This is particularly important for chemical names and structures which have not been included in the database as graphics, i.e. those whose precise molecular structure can be represented by a series of characters.