HTML Help Search Challenge

April 22, 2011 - June 1, 2011

Added May 2: We will set up a poll on June 1. It will run for one week. The winner will be listed on the challenge page here.

Liberty BASIC 4.04 has a help system that consists of a set of HTML pages. If you invoke "help" from the Liberty BASIC editor, you get a menu for these pages. The system is not simple to navigate. The left pane is very long and requires much scrolling to find the pertinent topic. There is no search feature.

The challenge is to create a program that searches this large set of HTML files for a given word or phrase and returns a list of topic titles to the user. The list can be contained in a listbox, combobox, or other container of your choice. When the user selects a topic, that topic should be displayed in his browser.

The HTML files can be found in the installation folder for Liberty BASIC in a subfolder called lb4help. The topic pages have <title> tags that look like this:

<TITLE>OPEN</TITLE> - for the topic on the OPEN statement
<TITLE>BOOLEAN</TITLE> - for the topic on boolean evaluations
<TITLE>END</TITLE> - for the topic on the END statement

The files can be searched for the designated search term and the titles can be extracted from all files that fill the search criteria.

For a great tutorial on text/html parsing, see Jerry Muelver's article here:
http://lbpe.wikispaces.com/ParsingText

When you've got your program ready to enter in the challenge, either upload the file(s) and put a link below, or create a page for the code and put that link below.


Entries

• Entry by Stefan - StPendl May 1, 2011
• Entry by Janet - JanetTerra May 1, 2011
• Entry by Gordon Rahman - GordonR
• Your entry goes here!