How to write a plugin for ASK THE WEB? ====================================== The idear of a ATW plugin is quite diffrent to the plugin technologie of Apple Sherlock! In Sherlock create a plugin by defining a start- and endpattern of each field in the webpage. When the webmaster of the search engine helps to create a plugin, than it's quite easy, because he can include in the result page secret tags. But when you don't have help like this than it could be very complicated! So ATW is using a diffrent technologie: the idear of it is to transfer the result page into a text file where the fields and records are seperated by TABs and RETURNs. Example: The result HTML-Page (just a part of it)..............

Result of search for "house":

boarding house pensione

house casa

......will be modified to this: boarding house pensione house casa To do this you have a lot of powerful tools integrated in ATW. The easiest way to create a plugin is to use the PluginMaker. With the PluginMaker you don't have to worry about the fileformat of a plugin, so I don't bother you now with this. The benefits of the PluginMaker is the integrated debugger where you can test all you plugins. Plugins Commands ================ FIND ---- Searches from the top of the page for the pattern in Value1 and stores the position of that pattern in variable X. XFind ----- Searches from character number X of the page for the pattern in Value1 and stores the position of that pattern in variable X. This is quite helpful to find for example the first table-tag after a form-tag: FIND

… MacOSReplace ------------ Same as normal Replace but will only be executed when this plugin is installed on a MacOS computer. Win32Replace ------------ Same as normal Replace but will only be executed when this plugin is installed on a Microsoft Windows computer. Remove ------ Remove all pattern in the page defined in Value1. RemoveTAGs ---------- Removes all HTML Tags. RemoveCRLF ---------- Removes all RETURN. CutTop ------ Removes all characters at top from postion X. CutBottom --------- Removes all characters at bottom from postion X. AddX ---- Increses the variable X with Value1. SubX ---- Decreases the variable X with Value1. Trim ---- Remove all spaces at the top and the bottom of the page. MacOSDecodeText --------------- Call the MacOS-Textencoding system to decode all special characters to macintosh conform characters. SetFieldSeparator ----------------- Replace the pattern defined in value1 with a separator. This tells ATW where the position of language1 and language2. In the moment, ATW just replaces this pattern with a TAB character (ASCII 9). SetEndRecord ------------ Replaces the pattern defined in value1 with a End-Seperator. This tells ATW the position of the beginning of a new word. In the moment just a return character (ASCII 13).