limitations of text search in user dictionaries

aristide

Member
I have a list of chinese sentences along with their translations, imported as a user-dictionary like this:
他的祖父身体健康。<tab><tab>His grandpa is healthy.
Searching "@@祖父" or "$祖父" returns the expected "definition", but "@@@@身体", "$身体" or "$$身体" gives no result at all. I suppose the wild-card search is optimized / works only for short headwords. So I tried the not-so-smart following workaround:
他的祖父身体健康。<tab><tab>他的祖父身体健康。His grandpa is healthy.
But searching "#身体" or "#grandpa" returns no more results. The documentation actually reads: "Pleco can also search the full text of dictionary entries, including both definitions and example sentences. This is available in all of our dictionaries", which seems to imply that full text search is not available in user-dictionaries.
The following solution would be both explosive and quite hard to generalize:
他<tab><tab>他的祖父身体健康。His grandpa is healthy.
的<tab><tab>他的祖父身体健康。His grandpa is healthy.
他的<tab><tab>他的祖父身体健康。His grandpa is healthy.
祖父<tab><tab>他的祖父身体健康。His grandpa is healthy.
身体<tab><tab>他的祖父身体健康。His grandpa is healthy.
健康<tab><tab>他的祖父身体健康。His grandpa is healthy.
身体健康<tab><tab>他的祖父身体健康。His grandpa is healthy.
I know Pleco was designed as a word dictionary, but if someone could imagine a solution to make it work with sentences too, it would be great!
Mike, any plan to make search more homogeneous (wrt long headwords / user dictionary "definitions") in a future version?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
These are both known limitations, yes - the entire user dictionary search system is optimized for words of 4 or fewer characters, though we can certainly add an option to extend that and support wildcard searches in headwords of any length (at the cost of a larger database size / slower searches). Full-text search is coming to user dictionaries in a release or two one we drop Palm OS support from our mainline product - won't be too difficult to add then, though it'll again be optional (something you have to turn on specifically) since it takes up a ton of space and significantly slows down new entry creation / modification.
 
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