|
DigiGuide ForumsDon't forget that you can sign in using your normal DigiGuide account | Home » Community » DigiGuide Forums » How many of you would like WILDCARD searching? |
 |  Quote(IP Logged) |
DigiGuide is an amazingly powerful tool for organising your viewing. Wildcards would allow the searches you set up in DigiGuide to become far more powerful, without getting complicated for the user.
For example, right now, if I want all Xena Warrior Princess episodes highlighted, I must write the name in the format currently in use - "Xena: Warrior Princess". "Xena Warrior Princess" (ie, without the colon and space) simply does not work! A missing space or character in the search expression will prevent the search succeeding, and you wouldn\'t be any the wiser of missing your favourite program!
Wildcarding means putting a special symbol (usually a * or ?) in part of the search expression to represent characters/words that you don\'t know.
So, in my example, I could use this "Xena*Warrior Princess" - this would bring up ANYTHING with "Xena" followed by ANY text, followed by "Warrior Princess". I believe this would be a huge benefit to DigiGuide and its users, and should not be hard to program (I am a developer myself). It has been mentioned a number of times in the past on the forums and there is obviously a demand for it - please help me to get the idea some attention!!! Thanks, and here\'s to DigiGuide! |
 | Quote(IP Logged) |
Im going to say yes as I cant really think of a reason to say no. If it can be easily done of course.
Administrator: Cable Forum : vBulletin.orgEdited by Paul on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 - 01:16 |
 | Quote(IP Logged) |
But then why not go a bit further and allow regular expressions, or (even better) a bit of JavaScript code so you could then say things like:
if( Prog.strEpisodeTitle.toLowerCase().indexOf( "(part 1" ) != -1 && Prog.strQualifiers.toLowerCase().indexOf( "new" ) != -1 )
return true; // we found the match we want// we havent found a match
return false;
My preference with a bit of Javascript is that you could search a mix of fields for different things (not possible at the moment), you could also use regular expressions or anything that Javascript supports ... so its pretty flexible. The only issue is that it would be much slower than current method so it would need to have a flag to say that you are using JS code and it would be down to you to know that it could potentially slow things down a lot. This hasnt even been tried so it could be impossible as it would be so slow that it would just take a couple of JS expression markers to stop DigiGuide working altogether. |
 Zork42
Wednesday, May 28, 2008 - 12:57 | Quote(IP Logged) |
I've always thought regular expressions would be useful for searches. And Dan's JS would be very useful too. I think you'd need to be able to select between the 3 when you do a search:
1. '*' & '?' wildcards - very simple to understand, so lots of people could use it
2. regular expressions - much more powerful than */?, but harder to understand, so fewer people could use it
3. JS code - more powerful than RegExs, but also longer, and more knowledge required, so even fewer people could use it Pulling numbers out of my ... err... head : of DG's users, maybe 100% of people could use #1, 5% could use #2, and 1% could use #3.
Edited by Zork42 on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 - 12:58 |
 | Quote(IP Logged) |
I seriously doubt 100% of people could use basic *? wildcards. I just asked four non-technical people, who use computers and DG every day, in our office the following question "If I told you that DG supported wildcard searching would you understand what I meant?". 3 out of 4 said no. I refined my question to "If I told you the search facility supported the use of * and ? would you know how to use them?". Of the 3 that previously didn't know one said something about using little pieces of text but couldn't give an example of how they might use it. Sure we can add some help but my experience of help is that it's the last place people usually look. I'm open minded about adding it but I did want to just share the results of my ad hoc experiment. If we did add help then we might as well have full regex as, according to my results, 75% of people will need to refer to the docs. |
 xerty
Wednesday, May 28, 2008 - 16:40 | Quote(IP Logged) |
Also, you would need wildcard search facility in help too  |
 Dave
Wednesday, May 28, 2008 - 17:02 | Quote(IP Logged) |
I'm a programmer and I would very unlikely use regex in DG, if I did, i'd probably come here and get someone to write what I want... Unfortunately regex was the class at Uni I learnt how DNS worked - well the lecturer spoke bad english and I had a far more interesting book all about DNS in my bag oops  |
| Quote(IP Logged) |
RegExp is a nightmare, even people who code (unless they use Perl, urch) have problems with it, so people who would be able to a) use regexp, b) debug it, and c) test it would be almost negligible. I like the JS idea for the reasons I have given but I fear the performance would be just too slow to be usable. Therefore, the best solution which gives a lot more control and would be quick enough would be simple wildcard support I think. But we are talking about it and will see how the discussion goes. |
 | Quote(IP Logged) |
People might not necessarily know what "wildcards" are but would understand the principle of using * and ? for missing character(s) if you put it in simple terms like that. As for having them in DG, great suggestion  Edited by Lee Stanley on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 - 22:48 |
Zork42
Thursday, May 29, 2008 - 16:17 | Quote(IP Logged) |
Any programmer should be able to pick up regexps pretty easily. Though, unless you comment them, complicated regexs can be very hard to read. Perl's 'x' flag helps comment them. I think I learnt about regexs from a grep or nawk man page under Unix. They are incredibly useful for processing text files under Perl. Some links, but these aren't particulary good unfortunately
http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrequick.html
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Guide:Regular_Expressions
If regexs are not allowed for searching, is there any chance that regexs andJS could be used in the Expression tab of Edit Markers? |
Dave
Thursday, May 29, 2008 - 17:24 | Quote(IP Logged) |
I've always managed to get around having to learn anything very complicated with regex - ie i find someone elses that has done what i want with regex or get someone who understands it better than me to create the regex i need... I wouldn't spend any time learning it to use in DG... but then I am no power user |
| Quote(IP Logged) |
Proves the point really, even you as a reasonably power user wouldnt use them. I think its such an edge case set of customers and circumstances then its unlikely to go in. |
Zork42
Friday, May 30, 2008 - 07:43 | Quote(IP Logged) |
On Wednesday, May 28, 2008 - 20:24 Dan Petitt wrote...
I like the JS idea for the reasons I have given but I fear the performance would be just too slow to be usable. I don't think JS would be unusably slow. And you'd only get the performance hit if you used it. In Class: ProgrammeFilter, Class ProgrammeFilter : isMatch Event calls JS for each programme, and although it is a fair bit slower than normal searches, it's still a useful and usable feature.
I'd be happy to help out anyone with regex problems.
If regexs are not allowed for searching, is there any chance that regexs and JS could be used in the Expression tab of Edit Markers?
Edited by Zork42 on Friday, May 30, 2008 - 07:47
|
 | Quote(IP Logged) |
Definately! This is the one feature I think Digiguide needs the most. As a sports fan, it sucks to have to keep entering every single varient on a show name - try seeing how many programme entries there are for the UFC, for example. Simply highlighting all "Sports" shows it too vague and so unhelpful (I turn off all catagory highlighting and stuff anyway). |
 | Quote(IP Logged) |
Maybe if DG had a tick box to enable an implicit wildcard search - call it intellisearch or supersearch or expert or ...
this could then search with wildcard replacing all spaces - which would mean
"xena warrior princess" would match "xena: warrior princess"
and - if an interactive search returned no matches then the "wizard" could kick in and ask if the user would like to try a wildcard search.
Behind the scenes it could use regex or whatever, which would then be accessible for the the real wizards.
Paul Webster |
|
|
Write a Reply
