[Surfraw-devel] Hmm...how best to implement this...?

[James Rowe]

Excerpts from Ivy Foster's message of Sun Feb 07 22:05:34 +0000 2010:
> One of the search engines I use most often, as somebody who works with books,
> is [bookfinder][1], an excellent book search aggregator. Naturally, the idea of
> skipping the web forms and just running `sr bookfinder ...' appeals to the
> purist in me.
> 
>     [1]: http://www.bookfinder.com/ 
>          "Search for new & used books, textbooks, out-of-print and rare books"
> 
> Anyway, there are three important items to search: title, author, and isbn.
> Using isbn is simple enough; you don't really need anything else, so I figure
> it could work to just have a `-isbn=' switch. But it's pretty common to need to
> search by both title and author. Is the best way to handle this to have have
> the title be the search arg (`sr bookfinder bury my heart at wounded knee'),
> with a switch such as `-author="dee brown"', and turn off surfraw's magic
> quoting? If not, any suggestions as to what would be a better way to go about
> this?

  I might be tempted to just stuff everything in to the title parameter,
as the search engine seems to cope with that ;)  More seriously...
Given that ISBN and author+title searches are exclusive[1], how about
making them a little magic?

  An -author flag and args would be considered a title, as in your
description.  And then, Iff title appears to be an ISBN send it as an
ISBN instead.  Checking for an ISBN can be done like this:

    check_isbn() {
        # The real function would use grep's -q option.
        echo $@ | tr -d ' -' | grep -E '^([0-9]{13}|[0-9]{9}[0-9Xx])$'
    }
    check_isbn this is a test # fail
    check_isbn 155622911x # isbn-10
    check_isbn 1556- 22-911-9 # isbn-10
    check_isbn word 155622911x # fail
    check_isbn 123123 # fail
    check_isbn 9780521871723 # isbn-13

  If people use something other than ' ' or - to separate ISBNs it would
need tweaking, but it /shouldn't/ be an issue.

  1. H.G Wells didn't write many Haskell books - http://tinyurl.com/y9wbhap
-- 
Thanks,

James
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