[pmwiki-users] Searching

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Mon Apr 9 14:33:11 CDT 2007


On Mon, Apr 09, 2007 at 05:09:50PM +0000, Sandy wrote:
> DaveG <pmwiki <at> solidgone.com> writes:
> > DaveG wrote:
> > > I tried searching for "--post-data" on pmwiki.com, 
> > > and the request consistently times out. Searching on
> > > "post-data" works fine. Is this expected behavior? 
> > 
> > Not that's it's a big problem, but is this a bug that prevents searching 
> > on a prefixed "--" or is there a larger issue with searching for odd 
> > characters?
> 
> If a term begins with a '-', it means "not including". So maybe there's some
> recursion happening?

Short answer:  Search for "--post-data", including the quotation
marks.  PmWiki quickly finds the desired page(s).

Long answer:  If a search is done for --post-data without the questions
marks, then PmWiki sees the initial hyphen as meaning "exclude this
phrase", so PmWiki does a search for all pages that do not include
the string "-post-data".

However, the current structure of .pageindex doesn't really lend itself
to excluded phrases, so pmwiki.org is searching the text of all of
the pages on the site in order to determine which are to be excluded,
and that's taking longer than the maximum execution time of 30 seconds.

That's why a search for "post-data" is quick -- finding pages that
do include a specific phrase can use .pageindex.

So, I probably need to increase the execution time on pmwiki.org.  If
this is really common/important, I could see about adjusting the 
PageIndex() routines to be able to optimize excluded term searches
as well as included terms.

Hope this helps,

Pm



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