[josm-dev] Ticket #485: Can't search for tag's which contain colons

Dirk Stöcker openstreetmap at dstoecker.de
Thu Aug 14 21:28:42 BST 2008


On Thu, 14 Aug 2008, Florian Heer wrote:

> Another day (uhm... night), another bug fix.
>
> The attached patch fixes #485, but might need a bit of explanation to the 
> user.
>
> In the search-gui, I have introduced a new CheckBox, labelled "use = instead 
> of : for key/value separation".
> If checked, the search works slighty different. "=" instead of ":" is used as 
> a token to separate key and value.
>
> So, if you have a tagging a) "test1:test2=yo"  and b) "test1=test2"
>
> searching can be done by ticking the checkbox. Searches for "test1:test2" 
> will find tagging a) if the new checkbox is clicked and tagging b) ("classic" 
> search) if you don't click the box. Searching for "test1:test2=yo" with the 
> new way will of course find tagging a) as well.

I don't think that's a good idea. It is very unintuitive.

Better would probably be a distinction between normal search and a power 
search (e.g. using regular expressions).

Regarding the ':'. Why not switching to '=' for the standard method at 
all? Usually tags have no '=', but very often they have ':'.

A good combination would be supporting // as regexp, so
xxx=yyy searches for key xxx equal to yyy, but
/xxx/=yyy searches for regexp xxx value yyy and
/xxx/=/yyy/ searches with two regexps.
If there is no =, then key and value are searched for the text.

Anyway the search seems to need some reworking:
- remember last settings of search buttons
- remember last searches
- easy repeating of last search
- The helptext-tooltip needs to describe full functionality.

Ciao
-- 
http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)




More information about the josm-dev mailing list