Meklet Blog:

String to the Path

Robert J. Tomsons, Tue, 20. Dec 2022

Meklet Blog: String to the Path

I love looking for pattern. How many times the word friendly is used or how often does the number 42 appear. For such tasks, you usually write small scripts to have them solved. I just used TextEdit to search for the terms. So I asked how often term X appears in my Meklet source code and then wrote it in a list. The terms are the name query strings that together form a URL. Not to be confused with the Web Search Query, i.e. what users enter into a search engine or the text box. Here the wunderful and interesting list of terms userd by frameworks, companies and developers. Lets start with the tail lights.

    01: _q
    01: terms
    01: qt
    01: queries_keyword_query
    01: ENTRY
    01: ALLField
    01: search-term
    01: searchString
    01: sitesearch
    01: course
    01: words
    01: stq
    01: search_text
    01: addsearch
    01: searchTerm
    01: searchTerms

With some terms, I was surprised and would have expected them much more oft. Like searchString, searchTerm or sitesearch. However, these were all only used once in my project and I would have estimated that quite differently. Yo can see here that a conjecture does not have to turn out to be truth. Only term ENTRY seems to stand out a lot. Let's get to the midfield, the terms used between 2-8 times.

    02: ss360Query
    02: text
    02: siteSearch
    02: searchFor
    03: k
    03: search_api_fulltext
    04: search_word
    06: keys
    06: search_keywords
    08: keywords  

Here, the terms already look much more familiar. If you work as a programmer, you can do something with the terms search_word, siteSearch and searchFor because they are self-explanatory. ss360Query is very individual and I think that a company wanted to bring ist branding into the source code. K is unfortunately far too meaningless and should be exchanged and text can also mean everything. Let's get to the penultimate group.

    16: term
    21: Search
    21: search
    60: query
    82: s 

These are the query strings as we know and love them. Most can stand for themseves and that's a good thing. Nothing is worse than a term that is too abstract that no programmer can do anything with. Search and search are the best, query and term ...ok, fine. s stand for string and every developer know that. Not fancy, but just ok. Let's come to the classic that is respresented alone at the top.

    97: q

q for query. Everyone understands this, is short and if you have worked as a developer for several years, you can automatically think for what the individual letter stands for. I thinks that's good. Nevertheless, I woundered how many different terms werde used and why there is no uniform standard that the developers adhere to. But in the end, ist is always the case that what has prevailed through some popular features is used. I would use qs for query string, but that's just my personal opinion.

Robert
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