From Kurt.Hornik at wu-wien.ac.at  Fri Dec 15 18:51:11 2006
From: Kurt.Hornik at wu-wien.ac.at (Kurt Hornik)
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2006 18:51:11 +0100
Subject: [Rd] A possible improvement to apropos
In-Reply-To: <m2bqm5cb4y.fsf@ziti.local>
References: <m2tzzznwgl.fsf@ziti.local>
	<17793.3882.104712.38161@stat.math.ethz.ch>
	<45819061.6030703@fhcrc.org>
	<17794.54905.373085.78347@mithrandir.hornik.net>
	<m2bqm5cb4y.fsf@ziti.local>
Message-ID: <17794.57487.766310.587998@mithrandir.hornik.net>

>>>>> Seth Falcon writes:

> Kurt Hornik <Kurt.Hornik at wu-wien.ac.at> writes:
>>>>>>> Robert Gentleman writes:
>> 
>>> I would also, personally prefer some sort of approximate matching since 
>>> there are different ways to spell some words, and some folks abbreviate 
>>> parts of words.
>> 
>> The same design has been employed by help.search for a long time, for
>> exactly the same reasons (albeit with slightly different agrep
>> defaults).

> I may not have spent enough time adjusting the behavior, but when I
> tried agrep for apropos, I found that I almost always got way too many
> hits and found the case-insensitive grep the right balance.

Have you tried the help.search design?  It uses approximate matching
only if the match string is long enough (no less than 5 characters,
something slightly larger may be useful for apropos()).

-k



[Rd] A possible improvement to apropos
Kurt Hornik