Re: search

[cld@xxxxxxxx]

-> I tried this in XyWin and found that to repeat a
-> previous search required a few more keystrokes
-> than Harry said. When I keyed {F5}se /word/{F9}
-> the cursor went to the next occurrence of "word".
-> But then when I keyed {F5}se //{F9} and marveled
-> to see the command line magically change to read
-> {F5}se /word/{F9} the search didn't execute.
-> Instead, I got the error message
-> Separator is missing
-Eric Van Tassel
You're trying too hard! All you need is a bare SE (no
separators). Try it.

A quirk of this feature -- I tested in Xy4 -- is that it
works only if you use certain characters as the search
separator. Slashes (//) work, as do vertical bars (||),
but double quotes ("") and single quotes ('') don't. Nor
do alphanumeric characters, or high- or low-order Ascii
characters, even though they're all "legal" search
separators. This is a debilitating restriction if your
last search was executed via an XPL routine, such as SEBF
(my standard search tool for intra-file searches) or the
new CSE, which purposely uses an obscure separator to
avoid clashes with the search string. (As you know, any
character -- including a blank space or even a 3-byte
Speedo character -- can be used as the separator, as long
as it doesn't appear in the search string itself.)

There are other reasons why this trick leaves me cold.
While it's useful to be able to repeat a search, I search
so often -- I just peeked and there are currently over 60
different search statements in my command history, not
counting the ones I used to do these tests -- that I'm
hard pressed to remember which was the last one I used.
I may want to search again for "blip", but it's unlikely
I'll remember whether my last search was for "blip",
"blap" or "bloop". Much easier to put a STACK.PM hint on
the CMline and pop the desired command out of the command
history. Or, using STACKBOX, to list all of my search
commands in a dialog box and cursor down to the one I
want. On the other hand, if I did the search very
recently, chances are it's still up on the CMline, or
near the top of the STACK. Either way, I'm covered.

--------------
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx
http://users.datarealm.com/xywwweb/