A user of one of the scripts I wrote a while back,
searchhi, dropped me a mail to say: it would be handy if I could take some action if no hits are found. After a bit of probing, it turned out that they were using it for an in-page search -- what searchhi actually does is look at the referrer to see if you came here from a Google/Yahoo search and highlight the stuff you searched for -- so you could fill in a search form and then search the words in the page and highlight them. I'm at a bit of a loss as to how the built-in browser search (which is Ctrl-F for everyone, I think, although Macs might be different, and I use / on Firefox) doesn't satisfy this need, but needs must and all that. Hacking both of those things in (have a
<form class="searchhi"> in the page and its first textbox will automatically be used as the search entry) was relatively quick.
The nice thing about this is that I took the opportunity to tidy the script up a bit; it was written some time ago, and created its functions in the global namespace, was careless about
var, that sort of thing. I'm now a bit happier with it -- it passes JSLint for a start,
modulo that I disagree with Douglas about single-line
if -- by which I mean that I don't cringe when I look at it.
(I haven't documented the changes on the searchhi page itself, because the in-page search stuff is obviously JavaScript-dependent and that's not how you should do it, so I don't want to encourage people to use it.)