Could FPC make an API for the official documentation search at https://www.freepascal.org/docsearch/docsearch.var so we could make calls like:

https://www.freepascal.org/docsearch/docsearch.var?word=List

and get back a JSON object that had the search results? This is important for integration with 3rd party IDE's.

Regards,
Ryan Joseph

Ryan Joseph wrote

https://www.freepascal.org/docsearch/docsearch.var?word=List and get back a JSON object that had the search results? This is important for integration with 3rd party IDE's.

No such API exists (that I know of), but the desire to integrate the FPC, LCL, fpGUI and any other API documentation into other IDE's and Programming Editors has existed for over a decade (by me at least). I also needed the requirement of having the help available offline, because I often worked in locations with no internet access. I'm of the rare breed of developers that actually reads documentation. ;-)

That's why I invested months of research in various help formats and eventually spent over a year developing a help viewer that could easily integrate into IDE's and Editors, and even be used from the command line or via IPC calls. The help viewer is now the default help viewer of fpGUI, and is called DocView.

It used the INF help format (initially developed by IBM), which is extremely compact, really fast, supports full text search. DocView takes full advantage of all that and can concatenate multiple help files and their Tables of Content at runtime, supports advanced searching, bookmarks, inline annotation and more.

Details on integrating Docview in various IDE's and editors:

http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/docview_ide_integration.shtml

Regards,
Graeme

Ryan Joseph wrote

at https://www.freepascal.org/docsearch/docsearch.var

Good to see Free Pascal now actually has searchable online docs (without the help of Internet Search Engines). That's a big step up from a few years ago. Well done to whomever was involved in that!

Regards,
Graeme

That would be me.

And there already is an API. How else ? This is Free Pascal !

If you look in the browser developer console when using that page, you'll see there are 2 calls available which do return JSON.

for dropdown completion:

https://www.freepascal.org/docsearch/docsearch.cgi/list?t=contains&m=1&q=as https://www.freepascal.org/docsearch/docsearch.cgi/list?t=contains&m=1&q=al

q is the query parameter. m=1 requests metadata. m=0 omits metadata.

For actual search there is

https://www.freepascal.org/docsearch/docsearch.cgi/search?m=1&q=equals

again, search term is in 'q'. m has the same meaning.

The JSON is straightforward.

But I will document the API.

Michael.

See my response to Graeme.

Even Microsoft asked official permission to use our website as pascal reference.

Michael.

Michael Van Canneyt wrote

Even Microsoft asked official permission to use our website as pascal reference.

For what need? VS Code?

Regards,
Graeme

Michael Van Canneyt wrote

That would be me.

Thought that much. ;-)

My bad, I initially thought Ryan was simply quoting the FPC docs URL with a "wish for a search URL". It's only after I sent my first reply that I actually clicked on the URL and noticed the search box. Very nice to see it available now.

How is the search data generated - via fpdoc? What storage format does it use?
I remember years ago I found a JavaScript search engine that could be integrated with fpdoc's HTML output, but that storage format was JavaScript (if I remember correctly) and was huge.

Regards,
Graeme

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

On 17/11/2019 10:22 pm, Michael Van Canneyt wrote: > Even Microsoft asked official permission to use our website as pascal reference. For what need? VS Code?

Stated purpose was special handling in the Bing search engine.

Michael.

Postgres database. the data is generated once from the HTML using fpindex. All is in SVN. packages/fpindex.

I will of course need to update the database when we release 3.2 and I update the docs.

I remember years ago I found a JavaScript search engine that could be integrated with fpdoc's HTML output, but that storage format was JavaScript (if I remember correctly) and was huge.

Well, that would also have been an option, but I thought it would be nice to showcase that FPC has all the tools you need for whatever task you set it

Never miss a chance to show off what FPC can do ;-)

Michael.

Michael Van Canneyt wrote

Stated purpose was special handling in the Bing search engine.

Either way, that's a pie in the face for Embarcadero. :-)

Regards,
Graeme

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

On 17/11/2019 10:31 pm, Michael Van Canneyt wrote: > Stated purpose was special handling in the Bing search engine. Either way, that's a pie in the face for Embarcadero. :-)

They might rather get a chuckle out of it, after all, it is Bing. And as you should know, friends don't let friends use Bing! :P

Ralf ;-)

On Sunday, November 17, 2019, Graeme Geldenhuys <

wrote: Either way, that's a pie in the face for Embarcadero. :-)

They probably asked Embarcadero the same question for Delphi language reference

thanks,
Dmitry

Michael Van Canneyt wrote

I will of course need to update the database when we release 3.2 and I update the docs.

I had a look at it too and searched for baseunix fpopen etc. Found this:
https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/rtl/baseunix/fpopen.html

Look at the example, specifically the top comment of the example:

{ Program to demonstrate the fdOpen, fdwrite and fdCLose functions. }

Is this a typo or indication of early, later changed naming convention?
Should be fp at the start of the names rather than fd, right?

Changed naming convention when switching from 'linux' unit to more general *unix units, more than 15 years ago.

Should be fp at the start of the names rather than fd, right?

For baseunix, yes. I have fixed it. Thanks for pointing it out.

Michael.

Sorry for the late response.

Nice this is exactly what I wanted. However when I started to look at the actual results I'm confused. For my example of searching for "list" here is the first result:

FCL units reference tfpobjectlist.html
Return the first non-nil object in the list

What is this exactly? I expected to get results like from https://docs.getlazarus.org where it would say this is a class or a method etc... and a description of the class. I had been using their API (Anthony is responsible for the project I think) but its got bugs and I haven't been able to contact the developer to fix them.

What if I want to see the reference for TStringList? If I enter that term I get lots of results but all I have to go on is the "context" which doesn't really tell me what the result is how to filter it.

Regards,
Ryan Joseph

You get a list of pages that contain the search term. They are listed in order of amount of hits in the page.

What if I want to see the reference for TStringList? If I enter that term I get lots of results but all I have to go on is the "context" which doesn't really tell me what the result is how to filter it.

If you want exact matches on class names or identifiers, then there is no such API.

Such an API can be conceived, but does not be easy enough to do, I suppose.

As with all things FPC, the sources are available:

svn co https://svn.freepascal.org/svn/html/docsearch docsearch

Feel free to suggest improvements. It should be easy enough to add a first element that contains an exact match on one or more identifiers by looking for a file with the correct name, given an initial directory.

Michael.

Where are the doc pages generated from? For example https://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/rtl/classes/tstrings.html has a nice header "Class to manage arrays or collections of strings" and also at the top-right: Reference for unit "classes". There is even a "Description" section which is pretty good to know.

Can you not get those back from the search results? Sorry if it's obvious but I don't know how you did the search.

Regards,
Ryan Joseph

You said, "but its got bugs and I haven't been able to contact the developer to fix them"

What are the bugs you want fixed?

There you are. ;) There are stray tags which are messing things up. For example:

https://docs.getlazarus.org/?method=codesearch&format=xml&phrase=List

notice all the <b> tags that are breaking up the titles.

Regards,
Ryan Joseph