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From: MitchellWMA on 29 Mar 2007 19:29
> Did you try Agent Ransack, it looks like it should do what you want.

Actually, I didn't though I have used it in the past when trying to
find a search replacement program for Win2K.

AR is actually a whole lot easier to use the the $ware one I was
trialing. So that's a bonus.

However, I'm stuck on getting returns that are just one word. Susan's
syntax doesn't work in either program by the way.

Following the wizard as best as I could, I plugged in
^s.*e$
to do a search. The returns are great but many are multiple words.
Most of the word lists are individual words per line but a couple are
phrase types of word lists so there might be several words on a line.

Does anyone know how to narrow the results to just whole words? tia


From: MitchellWMA on 29 Mar 2007 19:31
On Mar 29, 12:55 pm, »Q« <boxc...(a)gmx.net> wrote:
> In <news:suan0314960g3edg99ggplf6du4vadtu37(a)4ax.com>,
>
>
>
> MitchellWmA<nospamm...(a)nonsense.com> wrote:
> > After intensive searching found an app to almost do what I need. I'm
> > mentioning it only to give an example.
>
> > $ware Super Text Search v2.8 will search text files in a folder for
> > text strings
> >http://www.galcott.com/textsrch.gif
> >http://www.digitalriver.com/dr/v2/ec_MAIN.Entry10?xid=22609&PN=1&SP=1...
> > but it can't find all words beginning with a letter and ending with
> > another letter.
>
> > i.e., the best it can seem to do is this - when I tested it by asking
> > for "s*e" to see if it could find "software" or "smile" or safe" (in
> > its own text string search format, of course), it only could return
> > things like "she", "see" and "sue". No wildcard that I could find
> > could pull up words with more than 1 letter in between the start and
> > end.
>
> I'm not familiar with the app you mention, but the screen shot
> indicates that it uses regular expressions. There are plenty of
> freeware apps which will use them, some mentioned by others in this
> thread.
>
> To use regular expressions to find words beginning with s and ending in
> e, use
>
> \bs\w*e\b
> 112333411
>
> 1 - matches a word boundary
> 2 - matches an s
> 3 - matches 0 or more "word" characters, such as letters
> 4 - matches e
>
> That won't catch hyphenated words split over more than one line; if
> you need to do that, there's a lot more to learn about regular
> expressions.
>
> At the bottom of <http://xnews.remarqs.net/score.htm>, I link to what
> IMO are the best resources for learning regular expression syntax.

I didn't know any of this. Throughout the day when I could spare a
moment I went hunting for "regex" information. I found it all
interesting it's just that nothing mentioned returning results for
just one word.

Your syntax
\bs\w*e\b
above didn't work in either program. No results were returned at all
so I'm guessing they don't follow exactly the same rules.

Thanks for this, though. I learned something new today.

From: MitchellWMA on 29 Mar 2007 19:33
On Mar 29, 5:30 pm, jon <mcdaddu...(a)hhotmail.ccom.invalid> wrote:
> »Q« wrote:
> > There are plenty of
> >freeware apps which will use them, some mentioned by others in this
> >thread.
>
> >To use regular expressions to find words beginning with s and ending in
> >e, use
>
> >\bs\w*e\b
>
> Yes - I thought of a text editor; but one that *lists* the returns?
>
> NoteTab Light is interesting. You can load multiple text files and do
> a regex search through them all, F3ing to the next return.
> No list return option AFAICS.
>
> This works in NoteTab to find words that begin with 's' and end with
> 'e':
>
> \bs[a-z]*e\b

I tried this in Agent Ransack
^s[a-z]e$
but the "[a-z]" worked like a "." and returned only 3-letter words.
Bummer.

From: MitchellWMA on 29 Mar 2007 19:53
GOT IT!

Phew. Some days it seems like one is never going to reach the goal!

I missed the asterisk in my first attempt using "[a-z]" which is why
it worked like "." that returns a single character in between.

I'll get a grip eventually on all this new regex stuff. I suspect
that I just sped ahead a whole lot with this new knowledge.

In Agent Ransack I get all the words that begin with a letter "s" and
end with a letter "e" in all the text files in an entire folder by
typing this into the search box:

^s[a-z]*e$

It completes the search of some 250,000+ words in a whopping SIX
seconds *grin* And I'm estimating the # of words. Could be a helluva
lot more ...

UNBELIEVABLE. This is fantastic. The amount of hours this will save
me is enormous. And I can continue to create new word lists for
whatever hits my fancy, knowing that retrieving words as I needed
today, and phrases as I found out by accident, is possible in a
heartbeat.

Thanks to everyone for their help. It is very much appreciated. :)

-------------------
.... p.s., went to test how to retrieve the results and both apps are
cumbersome in that one regard. With AR you can save the results to
the clipboard and then you open Notepad or something and paste the
list and then copy the word you need from there. The $ware is a tiny
bit easier as it allows you to click on the word and it opens the text
in a viewer set to the line the result is on and then you can copy it
from there, a tad easier than AR but not much. However I can live
with that in either as the few moments that takes are completely
offset by the enormous amount of time I've just saved looking through
about 250,000 words or more for such specific results. Since AR is
also $0ware and easier to use than the other, it wins hands down.

AR wins big time over the $ware even more because you can save the
search criteria. Super Text Search - which has turned out to be not
so super - will only save for the session and then you have to start
all over the next time.

So my money is on Agent Ransack.

Thanks for all the help. The time spent today will be more than made
up for in the enormous amount of time saved down the road. :)

From: jon on 29 Mar 2007 20:09

�Q� wrote:

>To use regular expressions to find words beginning with s and ending in
>e, use
>
>\bs\w*e\b
>112333411
>
>1 - matches a word boundary
>2 - matches an s
>3 - matches 0 or more "word" characters, such as letters
>4 - matches e

I've only just realised - as an eternal newbie - why I have not been
able to understand the above.

I read with a variable pitch font. LOL.

Anyways - your expression does not work in NoteTab Light.
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