[Info-vax] Looking for some text search ideas

[Paul Sture]

On 2014-09-27, David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
> Craig A. Berry wrote:

>> A good regular expression engine would run circles around INSTR in both
>> functionality and performance. A full text search engine would too, and
>> if the data are simple, you could build your own with only moderate
>> trouble that indexed words (or characters if you wish) and saved either
>> unique key values or RFAs to get from the search string back to the
>> containing record(s).
>> 
> Not RMS, but similar.  The product file is just records with 50-60 data 
> fields.  Primary key is Mfg code + Part #.  Part description is not 
> keyed.  No good reason to do so.  Briggs may call a part "Gasket, head" 
> while Kohler may call a similar part "Head gasket".  Not worth trying 
> for any type of keying.  Thus my conjecture that a brute force pass 
> through all the descriptions is about that can be done.

The problem with a brute force search comes when the user doesn't know
that Briggs' convention is "Gasket, head" and expects to get a result by
searching on "head gasket".  Does your brute force solution insist that
the customer gets the comma in the right place too?

What both Craig and Bob are suggesting is a mechanism to cope with that.
When confronted with a search field a typical user is probably going to
be comparing it with what Google can do; a bitch but not much you can do
about it.

> But now you mention a "regular expression engine".  Never heard of such. 
>   Guess I need to look up the term to see what it's about.  Maybe time 
> for this old dog to learn something new.

"Regular expressions" (rexex or rexexp for short) are not an easy concept
to get your head around.  At first glance it's incomprehensible Geekery
expressed as gibberish.  You might want to delegate here :-)

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