Forum: Bug Report and Feature Requests

QOL Request: Searching for String leading to actual chapter it was found in

Sarkasmus 🚫
Updated:

I don't know if this is actually a thing already and I just never figured out how to do it, but if not, maybe it would be possible to implement it?

When I search for a text string and click on a result, it takes me to the story's overview page. If the story then has multiple chapters, I need to Ctrl+F through the chapters to find the text string I was looking for. And I need to wait in between checking each chapter to avoid the "Too many requests" page showing up, making that task rather tedious.

Is it somehow possible to send me directly to WHERE in a story the searched-for text string was found? Or at least show the chapter number in the list with the search results?

Replies: Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster) summerstepper

Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

@Sarkasmus

It's not currently possible.

This will get solved when I finish moving to a more modern text search engine.

The site's current text search engine 'SphinxSearch' is stuck back in 2014 and hasn't had any updates since.

It was forked into ManticoreSearch and it's getting regular updates. However, manticoresearch works differently now, so I need to redesign the contents storage and search from scratch.

I'm working on it.

For now the easiest way to do this is download the .txt version of the story and open it in a text editor and do your search.

Replies: Dinsdale

Dinsdale 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

For now the easiest way to do this is download the .txt version of the story and open it in a text editor and do your search.

I use Linux and do my searches using "grep" (on downloaded stories), although the text string needs to be relatively short because it does not work if the string is broken into two lines.
Since MacOS is built on some form of BSD it should also offer grep.
Does Windows not offer that kind of text search?

Replies: Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

@Dinsdale

Since MacOS is built on some form of BSD it should also offer grep.

Yes it does. Full fledged unix subsystem. But why would I use 'grep'? I would find it a bit cumbersome.

I have BBEdit, one of the most powerful text editors around and it's always open. It's just a matter of double clicking the download file and doing a search.

Replies: Dinsdale Michael Loucks

Dinsdale 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

But why would I use 'grep'?

It's what I know, and it - usually - works.
Where it falls down is on some pages retrieved using wget from spearfishlaketales.com - most are searchable but grep tells me that some are binary rather than text. Luckily my browser does not share grep's ill-informed opinion.

Replies: Michael Loucks

Michael Loucks 🚫
Updated:

@Dinsdale

most are searchable but grep tells me that some are binary rather than text.

Er, 'grep -a'?

From the man page:

-a, --text

Treat all files as ASCII text. Normally grep will simply print "Binary file ...

matches" if files contain binary characters. Use of this option forces grep to

output lines matching the specified pattern.

You can check the file encoding with the 'file' command and change it with 'iconv'. I often see file types misidentified when they use UTF-8. 'iconv -l' will tell you all the available file types.

Michael Loucks 🚫

@Lazeez Jiddan (Webmaster)

I have BBEdit, one of the most powerful text editors around and it's always open. It's just a matter of double clicking the download file and doing a search.

I couldn't live without it! Every word of my 15,000,000 word corpus was written in BBEdit. It can search all 15,000,000 words in less than a second; 3 or 4 seconds if I use complex regular expressions (which I do). It handled everything I can throw at it in terms of text (UTF-8).

Indispensable and worth every dollar to pay for the full version even though I mostly only use the features that are free.

summerstepper 🚫
Updated:

@Sarkasmus

Has there been an update on this. This would be such a useful feature.

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Forum: Bug Report and Feature Requests

QOL Request: Searching for String leading to actual chapter it was found in

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