php.net's mad js file

bubblenut

I was a little bit bored so I decided to have a poke around php.net and see how they're implementing that funky new predictive search. I got no real clues from the source of the form itself so I did a search for "javascript" which threw up, among other things, this link.
http://static.php.net/www.php.net/functions.js
Now, if you take a look at it it looks like it's giberish but it has to be read by the browser so it must be readable by me but how? Anyone seen/used this kind of javascript obusication before? What's the point because if it can be read by the browser anyone who really wants to will surely be able to read it?

Cheers
Rob

goldbug

Looks readable to me. All they did was remove any extraneous whitespace and shorten variables & expressions down to their smallest possible form, for download/processing speed.

... as far as what they intend to do with the cryptic stuff in each string... that would take some diagnosis time 😃

bubblenut

:o Ah, I see. I didn't realize that first line was all one variable.

/me trundles on to find out wtf it's for

cheers gb

Weedpacket

Not that I've carried it through yet, but dcp contains chunks separated by '}', with the first character in each chunk being a character to search for in that big long string, and the rest of the chunk being the text to replace that character with whenever it's found (implemented by splitting on the first character of each chunk of dcp, then joining with the rest of the chunk). Then more stuff happens.

weekender

you might also be interested in Google Suggest

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

bubblenut

Yea, I'm getting really quite excited about the possibilities with things like this. Here's another couple of links that might interest.
Simon Willson Sitepoint Blog
Info on XMLHttpRequest Object
Object Graph
I''ve been trying to persuade my boss to let me put a predictive search on their site. I was thinkin, build a real quick, flat file list of keywords based on the top selling products (update it weekly or something similar) and then query that so as to avoid unnecessary load on the database. Make all the geeks go "Oooooh! Aaaaaah!" 😃