Abstract: An alphanumeric search apparatus wherein a plurality of search indicia stored in a first operand and a plurality of elements stored in a second operand are operated upon by a data processing system to determine by means of search or verify operations whether any of the elements included in the second operand correspond to any one of the indicia included in the first operand. The second operand may be arranged in a sequential string of elements or in an array or table of elements and a search is conducted by comparing each element sequentially with all the search indicia and by so processing the elements until a match is found. A verify procedure is conducted by comparing each element with the search indicia to verify that there is a counterpart for each search element in the list of search indicia. For a search procedure, an output is generated indicating the storage locations within their respective operands of the search indicia and the element which produced the match.