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The Query function is a keyword search, allowing you to find bills on similar topics. Bills amend statutes, however, and sometimes you need to identify bills by the statutes they seek to amend rather than keywords. Here's how best to go about it.

If you search for legislation in Arizona, then you may be interested in finding legislation that amends certain parts of the Arizona Revised Statutes. Title 15 concerns education, and is divided into a series of Articles and sections which are numbered 15-119, 15-120.01, 15-120.02 and so on. So how can we best find all legislation that affects Title 15 and its subsections?

Be careful with wildcards!

You shouldn't be too aggressive on wildcards, and if you have periods or dashes in your number you need to put quotes around the search term. If you want 15-120.01 through 15-120.04 then the best thing is to just put in the individual numbers as search terms surrounded by quotes and use an 'any of' search:

If you want to look for bills affecting all of Title 15 (15-101 to 15-2406) it is less practical to type out individual numbers but you really don't want to use the wildcard search "15-*". For one reason because you'll get way too many results (currently it generates 279 bills) but also you should have a letter or number before the asterisk for it to work properly.

So you can use wildcards "15-10*" "15-11*"  "15-12*" "15.13*"  and so on or depending on how popular these statutes are for legislators (currently returning 58 bills) you could tighten up your search by doing a hybrid approach combining wildcards and full sections:

Searching might require some experimentation to reach a balance between typing out numbers and using the wildcard as a shortcut, remembering "15-11*" gets 15-115 and 15-115.01 and and so on.

A Note of Caution

You also have to take care when using wildcards because of the way the search engine works. When searching with a wild card the search engine has to decide for itself how far to expand the search. With words that is usually pretty effective, since there are only so many possible endings and words are only so long. With numbers, though, the search engine is on its own to guess.

So 5* on the end of a search might have caused the search engine to search for 5, 5., 5/, 5(, 5), 5", 5a, 5b, 5Z, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 500, 501, 502, ... 599 and then quit -- it can't search infinite expansions or it would never finish.

We can tune how many expansions the search engine tries. To balance thoroughness and speed, we have settled in 5,000 expansions. So you probably won't find 5123 using 5* as your search term.

But if you update your search to look for 51*, 52*, 53*, 54*, ... 59* then it will look for many more expansions, 5,000 for each of your 10 terms, so 50,000 total. 51* very probably will get 5123. 512* almost certainly will. You'll need to decide for yourself how you want to balance typing in terms and using the wildcard as a shortcut.