I started out a very ambitious project for searching overviews. Initially I was hoping to achieve some kind of "smart" search, a little bit like Google searches, although not nearly as advanced. I was experimenting with various fuzzy logic algorithms, but soon realized that I just could not get any useful results that way. It would require advanced artificial intelligence that is way beyond the capabilities of a simple Windows program.

I was just a smidge disappointed, but not really surprised. So I took a step down in ambition and decided to create a more normal search, but with some capabilities that the ordinary search in DVD Profiler doesn't offer. The name I had given the project, DpSuperSearch now sounded a tad presumptuous, but I was too lazy to change it.

So, here is what a search can look like.


The first column shows how many of the search arguments that were found. The second shows total number of hits. The right pane shows the overview with the hits underlined. Under Options in the menu you will find "Full words only". If you check that menu item you will only get hits for ... you guessed it - full words.

There are a couple of search tricks that are, for now, undocumented (since there is no help file at this stage):
* Use underline instead of space to make two (or more) words be treated as one single search argument. So "King_Kong" will not find "King" or "Kong" alone, but only "King Kong".
* The search is partially based on Regex, so if you're familiar with that, you may experiment with what works and what does not. I'm no Regex expert, but I know this:
- A period will match any character. So a search for "Kong." will match both "Kong " and "Konga", for example.
- If you don't check "Full words only", you can still force full word search for one or more search argument by enclosing them in "\b". So "\bKong\b Gorilla" will force a full word search for "Kong", but match any string that contains "Gorilla".

Note that the searches are always case insensitive.

At the moment I haven't created a web page for DpSuperSearch. That may come later. For now, this is a direct link to the DpSuperSearch 1.0.1 zip file.

If you find this program (or indeed any of my programs) useful, just a word of encouragement would go a long way towards keeping me motivated to continue.

Hey that seems like fun. In case you haven't tried it, there are code libraries out there for "Soundex" and similar algorithmic search methods. If you haven't tried them, maybe more fun to be had? Maybe another would be a Regex option?

Seems like you've covered the bases!

Bad news, good news.

The bad news is that in fixing the really ugly bug I created another bug.
The good new is that it's a much friendlier bug.

They both had raised their ugly heads if you selected search words where one word was the start of the other, for example "All Allowed". Fortunately not a common scenario. The old bug would hit once for every profile in your export file. So unless you fancied clicking OK as many times as you had profiles, the only way out was to shoot the program down with the Task Manager. Ugh!

The minor bug that was introduced was that if you had the shorter search argument first, then only that part would be underlined, for example "Allowed". The intended result was that the longer hit should be underlined, e.g. "Allowed".

Either way there is no way to determine that there are two search arguments involved in the same hit. But the latter way was the way I intended. So that's how it now works. I guess it would be possible to underline the double hit part in another color, but that's a whole lot more complicated, and really not warranted in my opinion.

Another good news (perhaps) is that I have now created a download page for DpSuperSearch. No more links directly from here to the zip file. So follow me now to DpSuperSearch 1.0.3!

Many thanks, Gunnar. Have to try it out. Greenie on your way 

Oh, I almost forgot to mention. There is a bit of an anomaly when you use \b for fullword search. The search works as it should, but the overview will also underline any partial matches. This has been the case since the first version, but I didn't notice it until recently. That may or may not be fixed next year.

Gee, I hope my tridented friend doesn't realize that anomaly is just another word for b-u-g.