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Re: Searching for "whole word" in NSString

Subject: Re: Searching for "whole word" in NSString
From: Mike Wright <email@hidden>
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:17:27 -0500
Delivered-to: email@hidden
Delivered-to: email@hidden

On 29 Jan 2008 12:05:09 -0800, Douglas Davidson <email@hidden> wrote:

On Jan 29, 2008, at 11:38 AM, John Stiles wrote:

Oh well, off to Radar to file a bug on the Find panel, and I'll
figure out some sort of solution. I can probably use NSCharacterSet
or something and look at the characters on either side of the found
text. I was hoping to avoid that, but it looks like I can't.


You should still be able to build on doubleClickAtIndex: to determine
word boundaries at either end of your search string and in the found
text, and then implement whatever boundary-matching semantics you
choose on top of that, without having to use NSCharacterSet or
anything of the sort.  Word boundary detection is complicated enough
(cf. UAX #29, "Text Boundaries", at http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/)
 that you really don't want to have to implement it yourself.

So, to use doubleClickAtIndex: to handle phrases like "want to see some", you should be able to apply it twice (to the first and last characters of the found substring range), combine the returned ranges, and see if the combined range matches the range you get for your found substring. Say this is "foundRange", would the indexes you use be foundRange.location and foundRange.length-1? That should handle even a single-character target, shouldn't it?

Unfortunately, testing a simple case in TextEdit, it seems that it can treat neither "a:" nor ":a" as "words". Since I sometimes perform whole-word (whole-phrase?) searches for such combinations, myself, I'm sure some of my customers do, to. (Since it would be off-topic, I won't mention how much I hate that Google doesn't respect non- alphanumerics in quoted search keys, except to say that the only criterion for "correct" behavior in commercial software should be what the customer expects--versus what is easy for the programmer.)

(I'm assuming, on the basis of earlier messages, that the Find Panel in TextEdit uses doubleClickAtIndex:.)

Regards,
Mike Wright
http://www.idata3.com/
http://www.raccoonbend.com/
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