Symmetric predicate encryption schemes support a rich class of predicates over keyword ciphertexts while preserving both keyword privacy and predicate privacy. Most of these schemes treat each keyword as the smallest unit to be processed in the generation of ciphertexts and predicate tokens. To extend the class of predicates, we treat each symbol of a keyword as the smallest unit to be processed. In this letter, we propose a novel encoding to construct a symmetric inner-product encryption scheme for position-aware symbol-based predicates. The resulting scheme can be applied to a number of secure filtering and online storage services.