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html Search Engine not working

4 messages · Jarrett Barber, jarrett@duke.edu, Marc Schwartz +1 more

Original
Jarrett Barber
# 
Hi All,

Just installed R on my powerbook G4 (Darwin; see more info below) but 
have trouble with the the Search Engine and Keywords html page after 
help.start() (with Mozilla 5.0).  I've browsed the archives and have 
seen some references to similar problems, but can't figure out how to 
fix it so that the search function works.  When attempting to search 
for help using a keyword, nothing appears to happen; I'm still left 
looking at the Search Engine page.  The keywords by topic links don't 
work either.  Suggestions appreciated.

jarrett

R 1.6.1 (2002-11-01)

Darwin Kernel Version 6.2: Tue Nov  5 22:00:03 PST 2002; 
root:xnu/xnu-344.12.2.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Darwin Power Macintosh; en-US; rv:1.0.0) 
Gecko/20020915 <developer build>

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jarrett@duke.edu
# 
Hi All,

Yesterday I sent a message about the html Search Engine not working
properly.  I repeat that message below.  I received some suggestions that
I should have Java running.  I take that to mean that I have "enabled"
Java in the preferences list inside Mozilla.  Yes, it's "running", or so
it appears.  I also opened (not from within R) the html help files using
Internet Explorer 5.2 (Mac OS X) and experienced the same problem with the
search engine html page in R not working, and, yes, Java is indicated as
enabled.  So, initial evidence seems to indicate that the solution is not
so simple as to have Java running.  Still, I am not so savvy about these
things that the solution could not be this simple.  So, other suggestions
are appreciated.  Thanks!

jarrett

PS  In my previous message I (actually mozilla -version) indicated
that I was running mozilla 5.0.  Apparently this is a futuristic version
and I may be running something like mozilla 1.0.  Suffice it to say, there
seems to be some conflicting information on reporting the version number
of mozilla.  Anyway, I don't think this is relevant in this case.
On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Jarrett Barber wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
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      Marc Schwartz
    

    

      
      #
    

  


  

      
jarret at duke.edu wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
but

            

      
      
      
    

        
after

            

      
      
      
    

        
have

            

      
      
      
    

        
to

            

      
      
      
    

        
search

            

      
      
      
    

        
don't

            

      
      
      
    

        
There was just an exchange on this earlier this week under Linux (RH
8.0).  

My experience is that both Java AND JavaScript need to be enabled in
Mozilla for the search to function properly.  Be sure that JavaScript
for Navigator is also enabled in your browser. This is enabled under:

Edit -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Scripts & Plugins

In addition, Professor Ripley indicated that in his experience there
appear to be Mozilla version specific issues with the search feature
functioning properly. That post is at
http://www.r-project.org/nocvs/mail/r-help/2002/9492.html.  Presuming
that the underlying Java runtime versions remain the same, this might
be suggestive of version specific Java/JavaScript bug issues in
Mozilla.

I would verify which version of Mozilla you are running and if need
be, upgrade.

Hope this helps provide some direction.

Marc Schwartz



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4 days later

    

      
      

        


  

        

      David Whiting
    

    

      
      #
    

  


  

      
Hi Jarrett, 

(I am a little late joining this thread, but I hope this helps anyway).

An alternative way to search the help system that is not dependent on
Java is help.search().  This is a very fast way to search in the name,
alias, title and keywords fields. This produces a quick list on screen
of matches to the search. What was not immediately obvious to me when I
first used help.search() is that it produces an object which also
includes the URL to the help file (it *is* obvious if you read the help
file as I did... eventually :).  I like using text browsers (like lynx,
links and especially w3m) for their speed and have written a little
function that takes the output of help.search() and makes a webpage with
links to the relevant help files.  I have just made a slight change so
that the default R web browser can be used instead of a text browser -
see the code below. I have only used this on Linux but I hope it should
work on other platforms without too much work. I hope I'm not breaking
too many HTML and R conventions, but this is just meant to be a simple,
fast hack that seems to work for me.

I have set up the defaults for using a text browser (w3m in an xvt
terminal) so to use it you would do something like this:

## Search for "t-test" and display the results using w3m in 
## an xvt terminal:

rfind("t-test")

## Search for "t-test" and display using the default browser:

rfind("t-test", use.text = FALSE) 

Obviously you could make use.text.browser = FALSE the default setting in
the function and then you could just use rfind("t-test") and display in
the results your default brower.

HTH.


Dave.



## Some code to help with help. It takes the output of help.search()
## and makes a simple webpage with links to the relevant
## documentation.
## David Whiting.

rfind <- function (search.expr, browser = getOption("browser"),
                   use.text.browser = TRUE,
                   text.browser = "w3m", term = "xvt") {
		   
  ## Conduct the search	and see how many results we get
  search.results <- help.search(search.expr)
  num.results <- length(search.results$matches) / 4


  ## Create the header of the output webpage
  header <- paste("<H1 align=center> Results of search for: ", search.expr,
                  "</H1><H2 align=center> Found ", num.results,
                  " matches. </H2>")
  output.file <- paste(tempdir(), "/rfind.html", sep="")
  cat(header, file = output.file, append = FALSE)
  
  
  ## Insert the contents into the webpage
  for (i in 1:num.results) {
    search.expr <- paste("<a href=", 
    			 search.results$matches[i,4], "/",
                         search.results$matches[i,3], "/html/",
                         search.results$matches[i,1], ".html", ">",
                         search.results$matches[i,2], "</a><br>",
                         sep = "")
    cat(search.expr, file = output.file, append = TRUE)
  }
  

  ## Display the webpage.
  if (use.text.browser) {
    system(paste(term , " -e ", text.browser, output.file, " & "))
  } else {
    browseURL(output.file, browser)}
  
}

        
On Fri, Nov 22, 2002 at 11:36:30AM -0500, jarrett at duke.edu wrote: