Do you store the index in a database?
If so you could have your people place the file in the folder with an
extension like .idx. then your taf only needs to work with these files

Read them in and extract the ^...^^ data into the database and then
remove them for the file and store the index information in the database
with the new file reference with an new extension like .vew

Just a thought

Ben Johansen - http://www.pcforge.com
Authorized Witango Reseller http://www.pcforge.com/WitangoGoodies.htm 
Latest downloads & List Archives @ http://www.witango.ws


-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:owner-witango-talk@;witango.com] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2002 11:26 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list witango-talk
Subject: Witango-Talk: Advice needed on dynamic indexing taf

This is not urgent, and the taf does work, but I am 
wondering if there is a more elegant way to accomplish 
the task.

We are setting up a web folder with help files.  What 
we'd like to do is drop a new help file into the folder, 
and then have it indexed along with the existing files. 

Here is the sequence of steps.
1. Each help file has a title, category and summary that 
are preceeded by a special character (I use the ^) and a 
double ^ to end the summary.  These are standard html 
files, with explanations that follow the summary.
2. I have a taf that reads the directory and returns all 
the files ending in .htm
3. a for loop that operates on each, placing the file in 
a variable.
4. I use <@locate> to find the positions of the ^ 
character in the string, so I can extract just the 
string that includes the title, category and summary, 
and then <@calc to calculate the length.
5.  I use atomize to turn the returned string into a 3 
element array.
6.  I use <@addarray> to populate the table of all the 
help files, showing the viewer the title (as a hyperlink 
to the actual file), category and summary of each of the 
help files in the directory.

As I said, the taf works, but when the viewer sees the 
actual help file, there are these unsightly ^ characters.

I tried using comment tags to hide them but there was no 
way to easily get rid of the comment tag characters when 
I built the array.  I couldn't seem to find a way to use 
atomize with a word instead of a character.

I hope this was clear enough.  I learned alot about 
arrays and string manipulation in the process.  THe main 
point of this app is to have people who write the help 
files just drop them in the directory, without needing 
to update a database.

John Newsom

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