CD-ROM Book Search Help

Preindexed and Exhaustive Searches
Search Terms
Search Results

Preindexed and Exhaustive Searches

You can search for a term by either using a pre-generated index of words in the book, or by dynamically searching all the HTML files. The first type of search is a preindexed search and the second is an exhaustive search. Either search mode can be selected from the checkboxes on the search window.

A preindexed search will generally take at most a few seconds because it searches a much smaller number of words. The length of an exhaustive search will vary depending on the speed of your computer, your hard drive and the Web browser you're using. If a preindexed search does not find what you're looking for, you should try an exhaustive search.

Search Terms

There are three different kinds of expressions you can search for, which can be selected from the checkboxes on the search window:

Word
Substring
Regular Expression

All searches are case insensitive. A word search only looks for exact matches of a word. A substring search tries to find a search term within part of a word. A regular expression search tries to match a regular expression exactly to a word. Preindexed word searches support three boolean expression operators: and, or, andnot. Substring searches and exhaustive searches only support the or operator. Regular expressions do not support boolean expressions, but you can use the regular expression alternative operator, | , to simultaneously search for multiple regular expressions.

Word Search

A word search only looks for exact matches of a word. If multiple words are entered, separated by whitespace, they are treated as though they're all operands of boolean and. In other words, only results containing all of the words are returned. This only applies to preindexed searches. Exhaustive searches look for results containing any one of the words, a boolean or, although there is one exception. When you perform an exhaustive word or substring search you may enter a phrase in quotes to find that exact phrase somewhere in the text. This is not possible in the preindexed search because only individual words are indexed and not entire phrases.

Boolean Expressions

When performing a preindexed word searches, you can use boolean expressions to augment your search. The following operators are supported:

and: look for results containing all terms
or: look for results containing at least one of the terms
andnot: omit results containing these terms

For example, if you wanted to find all results containing objects and distributed, but not programming, you would enter: objects and distributed andnot programming

Substrings

A substring search tries to find a search term within part of a word. So obj would match objects, objective, and objects. If you enter multiple substrings, words containing any one of the substrings are matched. So a search for: obj ing would match objects, objective, and objects, but also programming, typing, etc.

Regular Expressions

A regular expression search tries to match a regular expression exactly to a word. There are may different regular expression syntaxes, but today the Larry Wall's, Perl 4 regular expression syntax is the most common on the Internet, and therefore the syntax supported. Perl 4 regular expressions are close cousins to egrep extended regular expressions with a few differences.

The following Perl 4 regular expression features are supported:

Alternatives separated by |
Quantified atoms

{n,m}
Match at least n but not more than m times.
{n,}
Match at least n times.
{n}
Match exactly n times.
*
Match 0 or more times.
+
Match 1 or more times.
?
Match 0 or 1 times.
Atoms
- regular expression within parentheses
- a . matches everything except \n
- a ^ is a null token matching the beginning of a string or line (i.e., the position right after a newline or right before the beginning of a string)
- a $ is a null token matching the end of a string or line (i.e., the position right before a newline or right after the end of a string)
- Character classes (e.g., [abcd]) and ranges (e.g. [a-z])
  - Special backslashed characters work within a character class (except for backreferences and boundaries).
  - \b is backspace inside a character class
- Special backslashed characters
  
  \b
  null token matching a word boundary (\w on one side and \W on the other)
  \B
  null token matching a boundary that isn't a word boundary
  \n
  newline
  \r
  carriage return
  \t
  tab
  \f
  formfeed
  \d
  digit [0-9]
  \D
  non-digit [^0-9]
  \w
  word character [0-9a-z_A-Z]
  \W
  a non-word character [^0-9a-z_A-Z]
  \s
  a whitespace character [ \t\n\r\f]
  \S
  a non-whitespace character [^ \t\n\r\f]
  \xnn
  hexadecimal representation of character
  \cD
  matches the corresponding control character
  \nn or \nnn
  octal representation of character
  \0
  matches null character
  Any other backslashed character matches itself

Search Results

After you enter your search query and press enter or click the Search button, a list of results appear. The results are displayed as section headings by default. A section is either the title of the HTML page, or the title of the page, followed by the section title of the part of the page satisfying the search query.

You can choose to display your results as sections, URL's, or both from the choice menu at the bottom left. Looking at the URL's is useful when you want to know exactly what file a result is in.

Clicking the Show button or double clicking on a list entry will display the parts of the HTML pages containing your results in your Web browser. If the files are not installed properly, you will get an error message.