Forum OpenACS Q&A: simple improvement to rank_for_search

This will allow the search string to contain quoted strings that are treated as a single search term. (Since it uses tcl's eval, braces work as well as quotes but you don't need to confuse your users by telling them that. :) We're getting to the point on the openacs boards that IMO this would help a lot in narrowing down search results a bit.

drop  function rank_for_search(varchar, varchar);

-- escape out all ,$,[,],;,
 with backslash
-- then use eval list instead of split to preserve quoted terms

create function rank_for_search(varchar, varchar) returns integer as '
    set candidate_string [string tolower $2]
    regsub -all {[$[];
]} $1 {&} search_string
    set search_words [eval list $search_string]

    set max_possible_score [expr [llength $search_words] * 10.0]
    set score 0
    foreach search_word $search_words {
        if { [string first $search_word $candidate_string] != -1 } {
            set score [expr $score+10]
        }
    }
    set score [expr int(($score/$max_possible_score) * 100.0)]
    return $score
' language 'pltcl';

This is totally off-topic, but of concern to bboard users. Opera 5.02 for Windows 98, and probably other platforms, does not render preformatted text if there is a blockquote INSIDE of it. The blockquote tag first works fine and has the same result.