PAGE PEEKER

Here is the scenario: You just input "Canyon, California" into Alta Vista and clicked the Search button. Alta Vista responds by giving you 986 documents, 10 at a time. Which one is the best one to explore further?

If you had Page Peeker in your Toolbar, you could copy the link address with the right mouse button, click the Peeker button, type in "Canyon" in the Searchterm textfield, paste in the link address, and have every line in that page that has "Canyon" in it, spit out into Peekers Text Area.

Thus you would discover that this particular page was writing about "Topanga Canyon" rather than the redwood heaven near Oakland. Very handy for filtering the haystack when looking for that Needle!

All of the classes necessary for the project are included in the zip file. Just unzip it into a new folder and modify the batch file to reflect your local systems' directory setup.

You might also have to add a few directory change commands to the batch file to get it to run properly from Netscapes Toolbar, for Netscape tends to open up a shell from its own directory.

Due to popular demand, the zip file now includes the source code. Hope it helps you learn a few tricks, although you will find a few dubious tricks of my own!

I learned a lot of Java doing this little program, and borrowed extensively from David Flanagan, especially his Pipes Program and GrepReader from Java Examples in A NutShell, as well as TextCompOutputStream from Jeff Poskanzer who has many fine and clever programs at www.ACME.com

New! Fully upgraded version that is 100% better!

After 2 months of learning IBM's Visual Age for Java using Page Peeker as a test project,

I have returned with a version that is re-usable,(clear the searchterm field and http address, put in new parameters and launch a new peek with the GO button),

has bigger, bolder fonts for easy reading, and has a much more pleasant green color!