Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Search word completion

Just got search word completion working.


And I'm happy to report the word lookup is mighty quick with no special optimization techniques necessary. (Hooray! Less work for me.) Still have a little to do before it's ready for release.

As you probably already know, searches are not case-sensitive. (This is due to how the underlying SQLite database on the iPhone works. But it's kind of handy regardless.) When I construct a word completion list would you prefer "case correctness" or "no repeats"?

In the above screenshot you'll notice the name "Nathan" is all lowercase. This is because I created the entire dictionary with all words all lowercase. This was to screen out repeats (e.g., "THE", "The" and "the"). Repeats are not good because they waste screen space and selecting any of them will return all of the different versions anyway.

But then we lose the capitalizations of proper names, like Nathan and God.

Still, I'm leaning towards "no repeats" -- what do you think? I could also make the words all uppercase if you prefer that more. Let me know!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

No repeats is ideal, imo.

Also, I found a a bug in the search function. Searching for the term 'ebenezer' returns 0 results in VerseWise, but this term exists in 3 places in the KJV (1Sam 4:1, 5:1, 7:12).

Thanks for the hard work, the new feature looks rad!

Bruce Geerdes said...

That is one of the problems I was hoping to solve with the word completion. Some of the names have hypens in them. Ebenezer is one of them -- Bathsheba is another (displayed as "Bath-sheba").

I should probably scrub through the text and remove them. I believe they're a remnent from a King James printing that showed the pronunciations of names.

Thanks for your comment!

Anonymous said...

I have the RSV-CE and the Search doesn't seem to be working correctly for phrases, e.g. if I enter "holy one", it will show all passages with "holy", with "one" and with "holy one". Is this as designed?

Is there a way to just get the exact phrase? I tried entering "holy one" (with the quotes) but got no results.

Thanks,

Bruce Geerdes said...

Yes, right now there is no phrase search functionality. I like the idea, though, I'll add that to the enhancement list.