Re: Enhancement proposal that's not a GUI

[Keith Goodman]

On 3/14/06, Guillem Borrell Nogueras <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi
>
> The previous thread made me remember something.
>
> One common complaint about Matlab and Octave is that the help function is not
> useful as it could be.  One thing I like of Scilab is the apropos keyword.
> It searches around all the functions' documentation for one word. For
> example, "apropos solve" would raise fsolve, lsode, trisolve, \, ode45...
>
> It's just a proposal because I have no idea about how to implement it :( . A
> database? grep?

Octave 2.9.4 has a function called "lookfor".

>> help lookfor
lookfor is a built-in command

 -- Command: lookfor STR
 -- Command: lookfor -all STR
 -- Function: [FUN, HELPSTRING] =  lookfor (STR)
 -- Function: [FUN, HELPSTRING] =  lookfor ('-all', STR)
     Search for the string STR in all of the functions found in
     LOADPATH. By default `lookfor' searchs for STR in the first
     sentence of the help string of each function found. The entire
     help string of each function found of LOADPATH can be search if
     the '-all' argument is supplied. All searches are case insensitive.

     Called with no output arguments, `lookfor' prints the list of
     matching functions to the terminal. Otherwise the output arguments
     FUN and HELPSTRING define the matching functions and the first
     sentence of each of their help strings.

     Note that the ability of `lookfor' to correctly identify the first
     sentence of the help of the functions is dependent on the format
     of the functions help. All of the functions in octave itself will
     correctly find the first sentence, but the same can not be
     guaranteed for other functions. Therefore the use of the '-all'
     argument might be necessary to find related functions that are not
     part of octave.
   See also: which, help.



-------------------------------------------------------------
Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Octave's home on the web:  http://www.octave.org
How to fund new projects:  http://www.octave.org/funding.html
Subscription information:  http://www.octave.org/archive.html
-------------------------------------------------------------