Custom search.seperator with lookbehind, in combination with highlighter, produces highlighting all over the place

[hendrikp]

Context

A custom search.seperator with lookbehind, in combination with highlighter, produces highlighting all over the place on the page.

This occured when adjusting the camelCasing/PascalCasing seperator to not seperate words if the words get too small e.g. AStar should not be seperated to highlight A+Star. In such cases the relevance of pages containing AStar compared to chapters containing just Star gets left behind and not found by users.

Description

There is in the sourcecode a hack in place src\assets\javascripts\integrations\search\highlighter\index.ts which reuses the search.seperator for the highlighting by removing lookaheads, it does however not yet remove lookbehinds. Thus when using lookbehinds the highlighting goes bonkers.

There would be two ways to solve this:

• add a new search.seperator_highlight parameter which only is used for highlight seperation (new feature)
• for now also remove lookbehinds (bug of in place hack)

So its kind of a bug, but also a change request.

To solve the bug adjust in src\assets\javascripts\integrations\search\highlighter\index.ts:

-    const temp = term.replace(/(\(\?[!=][^)]+\))/g, "")
+    const temp = term.replace(/(\(\?[!=<][^)]+\))/g, "")

Related links

• Highlighter camelCase

Use Cases

In general seperating things like IsFloat etc also is not useful as when searching code Is+Float will result in many results but not in the function to find.

So the idea was to start the seperation of camelCasing/PascalCasing only with 3>= characters. Which would start with the classic Get / Set / Can but not with Is, or Single char prefixes.

The separator casing fragment was modified in such way:

(?!\b)(?=[A-Z][a-z]{2,})(?<!\b\w{0,2})

Sample:

• Starts seperating on GetThis, but not AStar or IsStar

Visuals

No response

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• I have read and followed the change request guidelines.
• I have verified that my idea is a change request and not a bug report.
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[squidfunk]

Thanks for reporting and the possible fix. We're currently reworking the search and everything that is related, so we currently don't consider adding a new separator configuration setting, because highlighting will be solved differently with the new plugin. However, we can definitely merge the fix for the lookbehind.

[squidfunk]

Keeping open until released.

[squidfunk]

Released as part of 9.1.18. Thanks for your help on this issue!