Hi, is it possible (is there any hook, an extension or a php-hack) to modify the search engine in such a way that the search term "example" would find "example" as well as "ex*ample"? Bernhard

Sorry, I did not mean a wildcard but a middot (·), the mail software seems to have misinterpreted the character. On my wiki, I use middot as a camouflage of ­ in the wikitext to mark silent syllable breaks. This works quite well, but the drawback is: the search engine no longer finds the term. B. -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: mediawiki-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] Im Auftrag von Zak Greant (Foo Associates) Gesendet: Mittwoch, 22. September 2010 17:52 An: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list Betreff: Re: [Mediawiki-l] modify search engine On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 06:58, Scheid, Bernhard <Bernhard.Scheid(a)oeaw.ac.at> wrote: Can you be more specific about what you need? Is there a specific logic to where the wildcard should be inserted? The general case (finding "example", "*example", "e*xample", "ex*ample", "exa*mple", etc.) would likely be quite expensive. -- Zak Greant (Wikimedia Foundation Contractor) Plans, reports + logs at http://mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Zakgreant Want to talk about the Mediawiki developer docs? Catch me on irc://irc.freenode.net#mediawiki on Wednesdays from 16:00-18:00 UTC & Thursdays from 04:00-06:00 UTC _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

Wow, thank you very much! I'll also go and read me through. As far as I see, the basic feature I need is a kind of parsing before the text is searched, whereby all middots in the text-to-search are eliminated. The other method would be to multiply the term-to-find with middots at every possibly place as you indicated. No idea how to achieve either way nor which one would be "less expensive", but the first way sounds easier... Bernhard -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: mediawiki-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] Im Auftrag von Zak Greant (Foo Associates) Gesendet: Donnerstag, 23. September 2010 16:29 An: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list Betreff: Re: [Mediawiki-l] modify search engine On Thu, Sep 23, 2010 at 05:27, Scheid, Bernhard <Bernhard.Scheid(a)oeaw.ac.at> wrote: Aha. That's a different case then. I know very little about MediaWiki's search (and the docs aren't particularly helpful in this area.) If I understand the docs correctly, the default search for MediaWiki uses the fulltext search capabilities of the underlying database. In the case of MySQL, there's no easy way to modify how the fulltext functionality treats content. Digging around, I ran across a page [0] on the Lucene search extension [1] that indicates that the functionality you need might be available here. I'll spend more time later looking at the various manual pages on search to see what else I can turn up. [0] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rainman/search_internals#Exact_article [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Lucene-search -- Zak Greant (Wikimedia Foundation Contractor) Plans, reports + logs at http://mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Zakgreant Want to talk about the Mediawiki developer docs? Catch me on irc://irc.freenode.net#wikimedia-office Wed. from 16:00-18:00 UTC & Thu. from 04:00-06:00 UTC _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

@platonides Thank you! However, the hook does not seem to work. Search engine still does not find 'ex<middot>ample'. Bernhard PS. For the time being I have replaced Wiki-Search by Google Site Search which ignores special characters like 'middot', 'shy', etc. and also finds 'examples' if you search 'example'... Extensions like Lucene-search or MWsearch may be costomed to do the same, but for non-specialists like me Google is definitively the easiest way, even if that means hacking the original PHP code of my Wiki. Btw, it seems high time to further develop the standard Wiki search. ***************************** ***************************** That's easy to do. Smply add to LocalSettings: $wgHooks['SearchUpdate'] = 'RemoveMiddotsInSearch'; function RemoveMiddotsInSearch( $id, $namespace, $title, &$text ) { $text = str_replace( 'middot' , '', $text ); return true; } (replacing middot with the real middot character)