On 11/2/08, Richard Hennessy <rvh2007 at comcast.net> wrote:
> It think a title search is not enough. You should be able to search
> the entire body of all help topics too, not just the topic title.
> In wxMaxima you can't do that and command line Maxima is
> just as bad. I am going to do it if nobody objects.
Well, I'm not convinced about it, but here is some info about the
implementation of the help system to get you started.
There is an index file maxima/doc/info/maxima-index.lisp which
is a lookup table for the Texinfo documentation (maxima.info
and maxima.info-*). At present ? foo does an exact match on
item titles and ?? does a substring search. It would be easy to
make ?? do a regex search -- I think the only thing to change is
to suppress the quoting of special characters. Looks like
:lisp (defun cl-info::regex-sanitize (x) x)
is enough -- that enables regex searches on item titles.
As for regex searches on item content, I guess it is necessary
to walk through the lookup table, load the text blobs, and
do searches on them. Maxima has a regex package named
nregex which is called from src/cl-info.lisp (to do title searches).
I guess you could see which functions are called, and use those
for content searches.
Hope this helps, & good luck.
Robert Dodier