CGI and find

[Richard Gaskin]

J. Landman Gay wrote:

> I want to search a whole stack for a series of words. Last year I
> couldn't get "find" to work in a cgi, so I did write an offset script
> that plodded through each field on each card looking for the words. It
> was limited to returning only those cards where the whole phrase was in
> a field because that's all offset can easily do.

Ah yes,  It's easy to forget that the find command supports so many options,
esp. since most apps' find feature is limited to simple whole-string
searches which offset does well.

While I've written apps years ago that supported HC-style find options, for
myself I'll admit I've rarely had a need for them, or in all honesty it may
simply be that I've been thinking too much in terms of whole-string serches
and have overlooked some useful power there.  What sorts of situations have
you found the "characters" or "words" options useful for?

While offset is indeed slower than mark for finding all occurances in fields
across multiple cards, if the data were in a delimited list I'd be surprised
if whole-string matches were not faster using offset (that is, provided a
whole-string search is what you're after <g>).

I have a subjective feeling of vague "muckiness" when using fields for raw
data storage, with the object and style-run overhead....

-- 
 Richard Gaskin 
 Fourth World Media Corporation
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