Application Of Programming By Example In Text Search

In our daily office work, we often need to use text editor for text search, for example, finding out all Email addresses of a certain company in a document, or identifying all the telephone numbers within a specified district. Obviously, the basic requirement for accomplishing these functions is that editor must support wildcard search. Fortunately most advanced editors support such wildcard search as Microsoft Word under Windows environment and Grep under Unix/Linux. Grep actually provides full support to a regular expression, while the wildcard and regular expression in Microsoft Word is only a subset. As a mysterious language,regular expression is usually understood by only a handful of people, because they look irregular and random. It is very difficult for an ordinary user to use regular expression skillfully for text search. So this paper aims to making dynamic text search easier to usersIn this paper, we introduce a text editor embedded agent called SmartTag. The main thought is using Programming By Example technology, which through an interactive user interface to observe user's action, record the data users input and action sequences, generation procedures so that users can apply the procedures to new cases. SmartTag embedded an agent in an editor. Users will inform agent the selected examples, the agent will carry out reasoning based on the example, and will be able to make an example integrated into the regular expression covering the current case. Reasoning also will be the regular expression in the visual display to users. Thus the users need not to understand the knowledge of regular expressions. In addition, users can also adjust the regular expression manually to make it more suitable for the needs of users. Actually this process is concreting the user's thinking minds. In particular, comparing with other existing methods, SmartTag has a strong reasoning ability for the string that has delimiters.