[Info-vax] Looking for some text search ideas

[VAXman- at SendSpamHere.ORG]

In article <o1iifb-02c1.ln1 at news.chingola.ch>, Paul Sture <nospam at sture.ch> writes:
>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 :-)

"Regular expressions" are incomprehensible Geekery expressed as gibberish
to denote WHAT to search for but it does NOT specify the mechanics of HOW
to search for it!

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