Issue 93801 - Find should find despite demarcated insertions
Summary: Find should find despite demarcated insertions
Status: CONFIRMED
Alias: None
Product: General
Classification: Code
Component: ui (show other issues)
Version: OOo 2.4.0
Hardware: PC All
: P3 Trivial (vote)
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: AOO issues mailing list
QA Contact:
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2008-09-12 04:54 UTC by nicklevinson
Modified: 2014-02-15 19:40 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:
Issue Type: ENHANCEMENT
Latest Confirmation in: 4.1.0-dev
Developer Difficulty: ---


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Description nicklevinson 2008-09-12 04:54:07 UTC
For a Find, bracketed substrings and similarly-delimited substrings, when
they're insertions, should be ignorable and interpretable to produce results. A
user may search based on known original text without knowing about a subsequent
insertion.

It's standard practice in scholarly and legal quotations to insert text into
quotations on good authority and bracket it. Journalists and popular writers
often use parentheses the same way, and scholars may use parentheses for
insertions into nonquoted strings. Thus, a search for "visit to the store"
should also find "visit to the [grocery] store".

Brackets are also used by lawyers and scholars to change case. For instance,
suppose a judge said, "One person, one vote." Suppose a lawyer writes a brief to
agree with it, and writes "We believe in the principle of '[o]ne person, one
vote.'" Suppose a user searches for "One person, one vote" (without quote
marks), but because the string is common the user narrows the search by
specifying case-sensitivity. Use of these conventions shows the author of the
brief was referring to a capital O but bracketed a lower-case o because it was
midsentence. From the lawyer's brief, you would know that the judge's original
statement began with a capital O.

A similar problem could arise if a cookbook said "Begin with the ingredients".
Someone writing about their experience might then write "Begin[ning] with the
ingredients, I made a disaster." A search for "Begin with the ingredients"
should find the latter, but should not find "Beginning with the ingredients",
which is different and lacks the brackets.

Not only should it be possible to return a result by eliding the brackets and
bracketed content, but an adjacent space should also be elided because of what
would have been in the original if no bracketed text had ever been inserted. But
the algorithm can't always subtract a space; there might not have been one.

To preserve literalness in Find, bracket-exclusion should be an option within a
fuzzy search option. By checkmarking for fuzzy, a list of options might come up,
all preselected but each user-deselectable. Bracket-exclusion could be one.

This, I imagine, would put OOo ahead of major competitors like MS Office.

I'm using OOo Writer 2.4.0 without Java Runtime Environment on Linux Fedora Core
4 with Gnome 2.10.0 desktop on a Pentium 4 laptop. I didn't see this feature.

Thank you.

-- 
Nick
Comment 1 Edwin Sharp 2014-02-12 14:31:54 UTC
Please attach example.
Comment 2 nicklevinson 2014-02-15 18:54:06 UTC
A search for "visit to the store" should also find "visit to the [grocery] store" despite the bracketed insertion and the additional space.

A search for "One person one vote" should also find "[o]ne person one vote" despite the brackets replacing a letter's case.

But a search for "begin with the ingredients" probably should not find "begin[ning] with the ingredients", since that's more different than the other cases.

I'm not set up to create a screenshot to attach, so I hope this helps.
Comment 3 Edwin Sharp 2014-02-15 19:28:39 UTC
Thank you. AFAICT not achievable with regular expressions.

AOO410m1(Build:9750)  -  Rev. 1565724
Rev.1565724
Win 7
Comment 4 Edwin Sharp 2014-02-15 19:40:23 UTC
PS a similarity search doesn't work.