[pmwiki-users] pmwiki search, can I use regular expresssions in my search?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 01:51:46PM -0500, Gautam H. Thaker wrote:
> The quick "Search Examples" that are shown when a search is done does not 
> show or mention any regular expression searches. Are regexp searches 
> supported?

Not by default.  The search is slow enough already with using string
searches; supporting regexps would likely slow things way down.

> Also, this is prob. too much to wish for, but perhaps it can be hacked, in 
> that when a search if found (meaning the page containing the search is 
> shown) and one goes to that page it would be great if the text itself is 
>  highlighted. Perhaps this can be done with something encoded in the result 
> of the search so that clicking that would show some highlight.

This can be done more easily in PmWiki 2 than in previous versions,
but it's still not trivial.  When finding words to be highlighted we have
to make sure we aren't highlighting things that occur in the middle of
an HTML tag....

> I realize that it may well be that wiki should not be supporting powerful 
> searches, and that some other tool ("Google Search for Wikis") may fit this 
> bill better. But just a thought.

It's always been my feeling/position that PmWiki should focus on being a 
wiki, and that a site should select a dedicated search engine tool to be
able to perform fast/complex searches (not to mention that such a tool
can then index and search more than just the wiki content).

Pm