[Surfraw-devel] Misc. annoyances

maru dubshinki marudubshinki at gmail.com
Mon Jul 10 21:33:45 UTC 2006


So, I've been using sufraw for the past couple of months (in
conjunction with ratpoison; for how I integrated surfraw with
ratpoison, see http://en.wikipedia.org/User:Marudubshinki/.ratpoisonrc)

Anyway, I came across two serious annoyances: the first was that the
wikipedia surfraw uses the sub-optimal default of the "Search" button,
not the "Go" button, which is bad news for an editor like myself- I
emailed the writer of that elvi with my suggestions, so that should be
taken care of now.

The second I don't know how to fix. Anytime my many search terms
include any special characters (from a shell's POV), it completely
screws up. Enclosing things in quotes doesn't help, since those quotes
seem to themselves just be passed to the web page (ie, I want to go to
[[Barnum & Bailey's]] on Wikipedia, with that exact title, perhaps to
check a broken redirect or something, and the & screws the shell up;
if I quote it, then I'm sent to the Wikipedia article [["Barnum &
Bailey's"]], which is not good!). The -q option doesn't seem to help.

Has anyone else found this to be an annoyance as well, or solved it?
I'm currently trying a tack in which ratpoison will call a shell with
a special option to not interpret any special characters and *then*
call surfraw, but I'm not meeting with much success.

~maru



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