[Oberon] Re: Text search is THE main task.

[easlab at absamail.co.za]

John Drake wrote:-
> Well I extended RX to handle multiple files.  It took
> longer than expected because I ran into a bug in
> RX.  RX as shipped won't handle files containing
> charecters over 138.  That's fine for a lot of things
> (all ASCII files for instance) but Oberon Text can
> have charecters over 138.  I'm not sure why this
> wasn't caught before.  It took me a while to realize
> that the problem existed in RX as shipped and not
> in the changes I had made.
> 
There were some 'updates' to RX.
My 2001 version shows: System.Directory RX.Obj\d
== RX.Obj  01.05.2002 15:07:30   11588

> Anyway I've added a command RX.GrepAll that will
> search all files meeting a specific pattern.
> For instance:
> 
> RX.GrepAll "*.Mod" ("Write" | "String")
> 
Are you making the code available [for beta testers].

> would return all lines from all modules containing
> the words "Write" or "String".  Of course that's
> an "or" type search.  It looks like you're wanting
> to do "and" searches.

Yes please !

Google blows my mind away: I need the press/print report[s] of
municipal corruption exposed on TV last night [here is deep-dark 
africa].  By ANDing a few key-words I've got it/them.
Obviously the print occured before the TV - google won't update
from distant locations within hours ?

What attracted me to [the existing] "Find" is that it
uses "Find.Domain <file list>", so you can 'refine/restrict' the
file search-space by existing tools. Eg. by SmartDir.Directory
[which I suspect is not included in the distributions, but which
I use daily, and should be included].
Running RX.Grep <file of list-of-files> \i <extentions/types to omit>
   trims out the fileTypes which are not to be searched.
Eg. in a BIG SYS: partition, you can skip all: *.Obj, *.Bak,
*.Scn.Fnt, ...etc. [which can't be moved out to their own
partition] by building a file list, [for repeated use], by repeated
applications of RX.Grep.

BTW. v2.3.2 has a facility & panel to include a date range for
the files to be searched [it's potentially problematic, since the 
date format required is not obvious].  I'm wondering why this
was omitted from later versions ?

> > Edgar  who wrote:_
> > > The problem is that I have to find WebNavigator
> > first. I'm sure it's still
> > > somewhere on my disk :-)
> > 
> > I believe that ascii-text is ascii-text inside of
> > *.Obj ?
> > 
> 
> A text search facility is the wrong tool for that
> job IMO.  Edgar could easily go to the 
> Documents.Panel, type "WebNav*" in the search
> box and click the "Show" button.  That would 
> should all files in the Oberon search path that
> began with the string "WebNav".  Or in this case
> it might be better to go to the website to be
> sure and have the latest copy.
> 
> http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/software/WebNavigator.html

Well yes of course if he knows 'something usefull' about the
fileID, he'd search for that.  But in a worse case one only knows
something about the file contents.

BTW is 'WebNavigator' usefull for local files ?
It sounds like being intended for inet searching ?
I don't want to spend half a day installing another package that
doesn't do what I need.   The collecting and moving of all files 
[copy & delete] to the appropriate partitions takes effort/time.

Thanks.

== Chris Glur.