# App/Search/Special page

From XOWA: the free, open-source, offline wiki application

## Usage

If you enter a search string and press Enter, a list of pages beginning with the search term will appear.

For example, typing in "Earth" in en.wikipedia.org will retrieve a list of 345 page links. The first will be "Earth" and the other 344 will be pages that are sorted alphabetically after Earth (EX: "Earth's Age", "Earth's Answer").

Note that there are Previous and Next links at the top and bottom of the page to continue reading the next and previous list of pages

If a search term is entered for an unknown page like "Earth1", then XOWA will retrieve the first page that would sort after "Earth1". In this case it would be a page called "Earth2".

Note that sorting is done using binary collation. This means that the following titles will sort in this order "AA AB AC Aa Bb Ac", not "AA Aa AB Ab AC Ac". This matches Wikipedia's current sorting behavior.

## Configuring

Currently, XOWA has not implemented the UI for dynamically changing the following:

- from
- namespace
- hideredirects

This will be implemented in a future build. In the meantime, if you want to change these, you will need to change them in the url string.

For example, after searching for Earth, the url string will read:

`http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Allpages?from=Earth&namespace=0&hideredirects=0`

If you want to hide redirects, change this to:

`http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Allpages?from=Earth&namespace=0&hideredirects=1`

If you want to search in a different namespace, you have two options

- type "Template:Earth" into the search box. It will automatically parse the namespace from the search string. Note that non-English names will also work (Vorlage:Erde for German)
- change the namespace arg to the numerical code for the namespace

  For example, to search for "Template:Earth" change "namespace=0" to "namespace=10"

Finally, the Search box can be configured within the config system. Currently the setting is the following:

    app.gui.win_opts.search_box_fmt_('Special:AllPages?from=~{search}&namespace=0&hideredirects=0');

If you want to hide redirects by default, you can change this to hideredirects=1. Please see Dev/Config_files files/Files for information about where to make this change.

## Future

As mentioned above, XOWA will add a basic UI for configuring from, namespace and hideredirects.

There are no current plans to implement the range functionality. For example, Wikipedia allows you to enter a from of "A" and a to of "Z". This will return a list of 60 groups of all the pages between "A" and "Z" (EX: A to An; Ao to Bd; Be to By).

This has a low priority for (a) performance reasons and (b) frequency of use reasons. It may be re-evaluated later. Feel free to contact me for further discussion.

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