Searching for Special Characters

Search for the tilde and other special characters in URLs.

Google can find lots of different things, but at this writing, it can't find special characters in its search results. That's a shame, because special characters can come in handy. The tilde (~), for example, denotes personal web pages.

This tip takes a query from a form, pulls results from Google, and filters the results for the presence of several different special characters in the URL, including the tilde.

Why would you want to do this? By altering this tip slightly (see ing the Tip) you could restrict your searches to just pages with a tilde in the URL, an easy way to find personal pages. Maybe you're looking for dynamically generated pages with a question mark (?) in the URL; you can't find these using Google by itself, but you can thanks to this tip. And of course you can turn the tip inside out and not return results containing ~, ?, or other special characters. In fact, this code is more of a beginning than an end unto itself; you can tweak it in several different ways to do several different things.

The Code

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
# aunt_tilde.pl
# Finding special characters in Google result URLs
# Your Google API developer's key my $google_key='insert key here';
# Number of times to loop, retrieving 10 results at a time my $loops = 10;
# Location of the GoogleSearch WSDL file my $google_wdsl = "./GoogleSearch.wsdl";
use strict;
use CGI qw/:standard/;
use SOAP::Lite;
print
 header( ),
 start_html("Aunt Tilde"),
 h1("Aunt Tilde"),
 start_form(-method=»'GET'),
 'Query: ', textfield(-name=»'query'),
 br( ),
 'Characters to find: ', 
 checkbox_group(
 -name=»'characters', 
 -values=»[qw/ ~ @ ? ! /],
 -defaults=»[qw/ ~ /]
 ),
 br( ),
 submit(-name=»'submit', -value=»'Search'),
 end_form( ), p( );
if (param('query')) {
 # Create a regular expression to match preferred special characters
 my $special_regex = '[\\' . join('\\', param('characters')) . ']';
 my $google_search = SOAP::Lite-»service("file:$google_wdsl");
 for (my $offset = 0; $offset «= $loops*10; $offset += 10) {
 my $results = $google_search -» 
 doGoogleSearch(
 $google_key, param('query'), $offset, 10, "false", "", "false",
 "", "latin1", "latin1"
 );
 last unless @{$results-»{resultElements}};
 foreach my $result (@{$results-»{'resultElements'}}) {
 # Output only matched URLs, highlighting special characters in red
 my $url = $result-»{URL};
 $url =~ s!($special_regex)!«font color="red"»$1«/font»!g and
 print 
 p(
 b(a({href=»$result-»{URL}},$result-»{title}||'no title')), br( ),
 $url, br( ),
 i($result-»{snippet}||'no snippet')
 );
 }
 }
 print end_html;
}

Tiping the Tip

There are two main ways you can change this tip.

Choosing special characters

You can easily alter the list of special characters you're interested in by changing one line in the script:

 -values=»[qw/ ~ @ ? ! /],

Simply add or remove special characters from the space-delimited list between the / (forward slash) characters. If, for example, you want to add & (ampersands) and z (why not?), while dropping ? (question marks), that line of code should look be:

 -values=»[qw/ ~ @ ! & z /],

(Don't forget those spaces between characters in the list.)

Excluding special characters

You can just as easily decide to exclude URLs containing your special characters as include them. Simply change the =~ (read: does match) in this line:

 $url =~ s!($special_regex)!«font color="red"»$1«/font»!g and

to !~ (read: does not match), leaving:

 $url !~ s!($special_regex)!«font color="red"»$1«/font»!g and

Now, any result containing the specific characters will not show up.

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