章 59. The Full Text Search

This edition of the PHP Manual includes an advanced full text search possibility provided by the viewer application. This enables users to to search through every word in the help file to find a match. For example, if a user does a full-text search on the word "Apache", every topic that contains the word "Apache" will be listed. Advanced full-text search allows a user to search using boolean, wildcard, and nested expressions. A user can also limit the search to previous results, match similar words, or search topic titles only.

The usage of the search feature is fairly straightforward. Click on the search tab, type in the desired words and press ENTER (or click on "List Topics"). Then you'll receive a list of matches from the PHP Manual (and the notes). You can use the button with a right arrow on it to add boolean operators to your search (or you can type them in). As you see the results, you can use the column headings (Title, Location and Rank) to sort the topic list. The default order is by Rank. You can also adjust some parameters at the bottom of this tab.

The words found are highlighted on the current page in the Topic pane by default. You can turn off this feature by choosing the "Search Highlight Off" menu item in the Options menu. To can get this feature back similarly. If you are viewing a long topic, only the first 500 instances of a search word or phrase will be highlighted, due to a limitation of the viewer.

General searching rules

A basic search consists of the word or phrase you want to find. You can use wildcard expressions, nested expressions, boolean operators, similar word matches, a previous results list, or topic titles to further define your search.

The basic rules for formulating queries are as follows:

  • Searches are not case-sensitive, so you can type your search in uppercase or lowercase characters.

  • You may search for any combination of letters (a-z) and numbers (0-9). You cannot search for single letters (a, b, c, etc.) and common words, like: an, and, as, at, be, but, by, do, for, from, have, he, in, it, not, of, on, or, she, that, the, there, they, this, to, we, which, with, you.

  • Punctuation marks such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;), comma (,), and hyphen (-) are ignored during a search.

  • Group the elements of your search using double quotes or parentheses to set apart each element. You cannot search for quotation marks.

注: If you are searching for a file name with an extension, you should group the entire string in double quotes, ("filename.ext"). Otherwise, the period will break the file name into two separate terms. The default operation between terms is AND, so you will create the logical equivalent to "filename AND ext."