[Pmwiki-users] enhanced search?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On 1 May 2003, John Rankin wrote:

> How about a '/'?  Thus searching for "Main/ apple" would find
> all occurrences of "apple" in the Main group.  Searching for 
> "Main/apple" would look for "Main/apple".
> 
> Pm
> 
> ---
> mmm maybe. So main/ returns pages in Main that contain a space and main. 
> returns all pages in Main plus any pages in other groups that refer to main. 
> (I sorta like being able to omit the space and write main;apple to look 
> for apple in Main group...)
> 
> For me, main;apple and main/apple involve less cognitive conflict than 
> main/ apple and main/apple.

You lost me a bit here--perhaps part of your message is missing?
Regardless, I think I like the slash character over the other characters
because it's already associated with groups, and I'm wanting to avoid 
introducing too many "special characters" into the sequence.  So, 
let's just say that if the search string starts with a syntactically valid 
groupname followed by a slash, then the search is restricted to that 
group.  I'm also planning to introduce quoted phrases into the search,
so if someone wants to search for "Main/apple" in all groups, they can 
quote it to prevent Main/ from being treated as a group restriction.  
I'll also probably make it so that spaces between search 
terms are ignored unless quoted as part of a phrase.

Question:  Should the group name in the search be case insensitive?  
I.e., should "main/", "Main/", and "MAIN/" all be considered equivalent?

So, here's what I'm looking at thus far:

   bass                 All pages containing "bass"
   bass guitar          All pages containing "bass" and "guitar"
   "bass guitar"	All pages containing "bass guitar"
   bass -fishing        All pages containing "bass" but not "fishing"
   base -"fishing pole" All pages containing "bass" but not "fishing pole"
   bass "-fishing pole" All pages containing "bass" and "-fishing pole"
   Music/bass           Pages in Music/ containing "bass"
   Music/ bass          Pages in Music/ containing "bass" (same as previous)
   Music/bass guitar    Pages in Music/ containing "bass" and "guitar"
   Music/ bass guitar   Pages in Music/ containing "bass" and "guitar"
   Music/ "bass guitar" Pages in Music/ containing "bass guitar"
   Music/               All pages in Music/
   "Music/bass"         All pages containing "Music/bass"
   Main/ Music/bass     All pages in Main/ containing "Music/bass"

Does this work for you?  The simple ones seem to work and the more complex
formulations are logical and work without interfering with the simple
ones.

Pm