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  Controlling the Depth of Search

The findme command allows you to find information at the level of detail you want by searching any of four categories of information associated with hypertext documents:

  1.   The document name (-n switch)
    This is given by the name of the directory that contains the document. For example, the name of the document you are reading now is "sun188" because its hypertext version resides in a directory called "sun188.htx". The name of a document may indicate what category of information it contains and is very quick and easy to search.

  2.   The document title (-t switch)
    This is extracted from the "top" HTML page of a document and consists of the text that appears between the <TITLE> and </TITLE> tags in the HTML header section for that page. The title of a document is obviously a good place to search for important topics and this can be done quite quickly.

  3.   The document's page headings (-h switch)
    These are extracted in the same way as the document title (above), but from all the other HTML pages in the document, excluding the "top" page. If you have converted your document from a format such as LaTeX, then these will be the section headings that appear in the printed form of the document. This is normally a fruitful place to search for slightly more specialised topics and can be done without a serious time penalty because HTX caches this information in a document's index file.

  4.   The lines of text in the document (-l switch)
    These consist of the contents of all the HTML files in the document (including all their HTML tags, URLs, etc). This is the ultimate place to search for information, but this can take quite a while if the documentation set is large.

If none of the switches shown above is used when findme is invoked, its default action is to:

  1. Search the document titles
  2. If that fails to find a match, search the page headings
  3. If that fails to find a match, search the lines of text

However, if one or more of the -n, -t, -h or -l switches is used, then only the specified categories of information will be searched, and this will be done in a single pass through all the documents. For instance:

findme -n sun

will cause only the document names to be searched (for the string "sun"), while:

findme -t sun

would search only the document titles, and:

findme -t -h sun

would search both the titles and page headings in a single pass.



next up previous
Next: Searching Specific Documents
Up: SEARCHING FOR INFORMATION IN DOCUMENTS
Previous: Performing Keyword Searches



HTX Hypertext Cross-Reference Utilities
Starlink User Note 188
R.F. Warren-Smith
6th January 1998
E-mail:rfws@star.rl.ac.uk