Processing Data

Glossary

The designers of the 32-bit full-text search engine for Microsoft WinHelp created global code for parsing, searching, and sorting data using a number of NLSAPI calls. The engine manipulates data in Unicode and runs on three platforms: Windows 3.1 using Win32s, Windows NT, and Windows 95. The next three sections of this chapter use the WinHelp engine as an example of the way in which applications take advantage of national language support in Win32.

The search engine (see Figure 5-9) compares a word or a phrase typed in by the user against all the words contained in a set of articles, which it lists in sorted order. The search engine also lists the articles that include the key word or phrase typed in by the user. To construct the sorted lists, the engine's first task is to lexically analyze the text of the articles and break the text down into words.

Figure 5-9 The WinHelp full-text search user interface.