[sword-devel] Comming soon: new improved sword searching

[Joel Mawhorter]

On September 8, 2002 09:48, Leon Brooks wrote:
> On Sun, 8 Sep 2002 13:42, Joel Mawhorter wrote:
> > If any of you can think of an example of something that you do
> > with the current regular expression searching that won't be possible with
> > what I described above, please let me know.
>
> All verses containing two or more of God, Good or Greed: (g[ore]*d){2,}

Do you actually do this? I can think of many examples of searches I could do 
with regexps that I couldn't do with the functionality I am proposing. 
However, I can't think of any examples that I would actually use for any 
practical purpose. Since I am not going to remove or change the current 
regexp functionality all I really care about is whether there is some way I 
could extend what I am proposing to cover things that people currently do 
with regexp since regexp will not (and probably can not) get an speed boost 
but the new searching will be much faster.

> It's true that most people can't be bothered learning regex, but I think
> losing it would be a Bad Idea. If you're after speed improvements, do a
> plaintext/indexed search up to the first special character before handing
> over to regex proper. Be aware that regex libraries are sufficient
> efficient these days that you might not see any improvement, depending on
> how much indexing you get to use (by way of reducing the search space) on
> the way in.

Never fear, I'm only adding, not taking away :-).

Joel

> Cheers; Leon