Abstract: Method and system for representing a strong of alpha characters, numeral characters and/or delimiters that allows uniform searching procedures, whether or not numerals and/or delimiters are present in the string. Numerical sub strings, containing only numerals and delimiters, are re characterized in binary format and are separated from, and later recombined with, sub strings containing only alpha characters and delimiters, to provide a modified searchable string in binary format Floating point numbers are easily handled in this approach. Delimiters may be any subset of ASCII characters, as distinguished from numerals and from alpha characters. A numeral character, to be transmitted as a sequence of bits, is optimized by expression in a base (power of 2) requiring the smallest bit count.

Abstract: Method and associated system for partitioning a collection of databases, by indexing folders within each database, files within each folder, documents within each file, and features (characters, words, phrases, symbols, expressions and image components) with each document so that content and context searching can proceed at any level. Databases need not be mutually exclusive, and a document, file or folder may be referenced in more than one database. One or more documents or files or folders or databases can be added to, or deleted from, the collection without changing the indexing scheme or interpretation assigned to a concatenated index.