What you would do is scan the files in the help directory to make a tree, the first node would point to all letters and characters, and each letter and character would point to sub-letters and characters. If the alphabet was B-D , DAD would be represented like this (I hope it looks right) if it appeared in sections: NULL NULL / / *-NULL A-----NULL SECTION1 SECTION2 \ / \ / / D-----NULL D----*---------* \ NULL So the tree goes Root->D->A->D which holds a linked list that points to the sections it appears in. You would only initialize parts of the tree as words are added. Words such as AND, OR, THAT wouldn't be added to the tree and would be filtered out. Then the tree has to be stored in a binary file like this. <ROOT>+A+D:1,2,5+D:5-S:8--R+T:10,8 Which would mean: Start with root Make child A Make child D Add sections 1,2, and 5 to this child (Word = "AD") Add child D Add section 5 to this child (WORD = "ADD") Go back to parent Add child S Add section 8 (WORD = "ADS") etc. The way you can write the file is really easy. Just do transversal of the tree using a recursive function. Also, it makes it really easy to handle wildcards. All you have to do for DA* is go to *->D->A and do a transversal of the subtree. For D*D*, you would just go through all the children of D and do a transversal of their subtree. You can do pointers in javascript, I believe. But if its too slow, it could be written in XPCOM.

Also see bug 46917

Marking NEW.

Shouldn't an index be created?

oh wait what am I talking about. We already have an help index. Just search through that instead of every word in the help files.

Moving to Moz 1.0. Accepting as general search bug.

Mozilla 1.0.1? Why? Ian, I think I heard you mention you were working on this recently. If so, great! This is a widely reported user request from 6.1 and 6.2, reading through submitted feedback. Many people simply cannot find help content that is available. This has far reaching implications: increased tech support calls; increased dissatisfaction with the product because of an inability to get help on finding key features (like clearing the location bar history, another common complaint, which is actually a feature we have); and, of course, wasted effort spent writing help documentation since there's no way to find it. Nominating for machv, resetting target milestone for reconsideration.

I have been going back and forth with Peter Wilson about this (cc'ing him here). He's come up with some lightweight, client-side code that searches against all the headers in the TOC, and pending some changes to the outliner/toc logic, against all the terms in the index. We could check this in pretty soon after some cleanup, but I have some trouble calling it "search" when it isn't actually hitting the content and indexing it. The solution would be to use some open C++-based indexing tool (and I think David Ascher mentioned this in another bug somewhere, prolly 67376) and then get it into XPCOM, but I don't have the time or the wherewithall to do this now. Blake, if that's something you think you or someone else could help out on--or if you think we could use a version of the RDF-matching stuff as a real search pane--then machV is easy. Otherwise, I'm not sure if we can get to it. We should talk. The stuff Peter sent me has sidebar-like panels, the search stuff, outliners. Very nice. But we gotta get some process going and make sure we're working against some spec so we can share the load, decide what's going in, etc. I have a XPI of this new help but I can't get to it right now. I will post it on a web page where help developers and the brave can install it and take a look.

there is some more work to do here, since this matching needs to work against the index as well as the toc, and it doesn't currently. But here is the basis for what I hope will be a "lookahead" style search facility implemented as something like a textfield above the toc and/or the index panes in the left panel, compliments of peter wilson

*** Bug 108695 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

fixed, right?

Yes, there is a search engine in help and it works. Marking verified win xp build 2002032803, linux build 2002032808 and Mac OS X build 2002032808