eogas / refind

Regex enabled "Find" in Chrome

refind

what?

refind is a simple Chrome extension that adds in the ability to find text on a page using regular expressions.

why?

Sometimes when searching a page, a simple text match can be inconvenient. For example, if I want to search for the abbreviation for the state I live in ("WI"), I'll end up with tons of matches against words like "with". I can add a space after my search term ("WI "), but this will exclude instances of WI that precede punctuation.

With refind, I can simply do a search for "WI\W".

attribution

• refind depends on jQuery
• Search icon created by Yannick Lung

refind's Issues

Improve DOM handling

Matching currently depends on some hacky behavior, where we process a handful of HTML tag types in an arbitrary order of precedence, and search for matches in the "textContent" representation of the element. This means matches can't cross between (anchor in a paragraph tag for instance). As well, since the textContent property simplifies child tags into raw text, the current implementation will match the same text multiple times.

IDEA: Check out the Chromium source to see how they handle highlighting for the native find feature.