Searching text external to Livecode

[Peter Bogdanoff]

Hi all,

I’m building a text-heavy application that requires a good text search capability. I’ve been using Scott McDonald’s RRPsearch plugin for awhile now with good results. However:

1. It doesn’t seem to handle text that has extended characters next to words—like long dashes, curly quotes, etc.—and tends to leave those words out of the search index. So I’ve had to modify things to make it work (put spaces around those words), but that solution doesn’t seem to work in LC 8 now. Livecode’s find command in LC8 is really, REALLY slow when you're doing multiple (thousands) of finds. And this way of doing things won’t work in the my next step...

2. I’m moving my application from LC stacks each with multiple cards containing text in fields, to having the text and data stored externally on disk in HTML files, and showing the text in a viewer stack.

3. I’m also starting to have multiple languages in addition to English—Chinese right now—that also needs to have search capability.

Does anyone know if there a solution that search indexes folders of HTML files that I can implement into Livecode? And also handles non-English text?

Peter Bogdanoff
UCLA