"A concordancer is a program that searches a corpus for a selected word or phrase and presents every instance of that word or phrase in the centre of the computer screen, with the words that come before and after it to the left and right." (Hunston 2010: 39)

The program first looks for matches of the "Search word or phrase" in electronic files that contain only the text of the works and the segmentation of text by spaces. Other forms of segmentation, e.g, daṇḍas, commas, full stops, colons, hyphens, etc., or page and line numbers are not included in these files.
By this method the search for, e.g, "saprayojana", will procure also a match in a character string which may read "sapra-004,01 yojanatvasādhanam" in another electronic version of the work.

If matches are found, the program will search for these matches in electronic version of the works, which contain page and line references for the text and procure the respective reference.
The search for, e.g., "saprayojana" will procure the reference "TAŚVA 3,35-4,1" beside others.