Approaches to do keyword search in FAQ

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Approaches to do keyword search in FAQ

My site (ASP.NET + C#) has FAQ data pull from another site's web service in XML format. The data size is pretty small (just about 50 faqs). I want to implement a keyword search for the FAQ and highlight the search keyword. What could be a fast and easy approach to do this?

My first thought is just using a C# string search or any XML search method. I know this is not scalable. But consider the FAQ is little, it may not need to index the FAQ. I could be wrong. Can anyone give me some suggestions? Thanks.

+2 A:

The best solution to this is using Regular Expressions. RegEx scales well too, so you don't need to worry that much about speed. Using RegEx Replace, adding a tag around the matches to make them stand out is easy as well.

You can find a good RegEx tutorial here. It has good info about both general RegEx use, and that link goes to their explanation about .NETs implementation.

RegEx has a step learning curve, but it is worth the effort, because it is incredibly powerful.

davisoa 2010-10-07 01:17:29

@davisoa: thanks for the great idea. But if I want the search box can filter some words like "is, the",etc. And maybe some other basic functionality for search box.

Stan 2010-10-07 06:38:09

I'm not sure I follow you - you want to exclude "is" and "the" from the matches?

davisoa 2010-10-07 15:13:21

I want when there're is/the appears in the search term, they will be skipped since searching those keyword is meaningless.

Stan 2010-10-07 17:29:34

In that case, I would just use `String.Split(' ')` to break up the keyword text, and then remove any instance of "is" or "the" in the resulting array. Then process each remaining member the array using a RegEx Replace against the FAQs.

davisoa 2010-10-07 21:57:29

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Approaches to do keyword search in FAQ

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