Affiliates

back to safari | login

Welcome

QuickLinks

Web Services

Examples

FAQs

My Account

	Making Requests

	Searching

	Understanding Responses

	Working with Responses

	Quick Reference

Safari Search Syntax

Simple Search

The most basic search with the Safari API can simply be a single search term. If you'd like to find books that contain the term "XML" somewhere in the title or text, you can send "XML" as your search query:

http://safari.oreilly.com/xmlapi/?search=XML

The Safari Search Syntax also allows you to combine several terms with the logical operators AND, OR, NEAR, or ANDNOT. So to find all books that contain the term "XML" near the term "XSLT", you can combine them into the query XML NEAR XSLT. Once escaped for a URL, the API request for this query looks like:

http://safari.oreilly.com/xmlapi/?search=XML%20NEAR%20XSLT

You can also go beyond using keyword searches by creating queries with various operators available in the Safari Search Syntax.

Search Operators

The Safari Search Syntax offers a number of search operators to refine requests even further. These operators can be used alone or in combination to return very specific search results.

Operator Description Query Example

CODE Finds matches within code fragments. CODE "XML::Simple"

NOTE Finds matches within Tips and How-Tos. NOTE "web services"

TITLE Finds matches within section titles. TITLE "web services"

BOOKTITLE Finds matches within book titles. BOOKTITLE LIKE "XML"

CATEGORY Finds matches with the given category ID. CATEGORY=itbooks.security

AUTHOR Finds matches by author. AUTHOR=Wall

ISBN Finds matches by ISBN. ISBN LIKE 1565921496

PUBLDATE Finds matches by publication date. PUBLDATE > 20020101

PUBLISHER Finds matches with the given publisher name. PUBLISHER=O'Reilly

To use several operators in combination, enclose each expression in parenthesis and join them with the logical operators AND, OR, or NEAR. For example, to return all books with "XML" in the title published by O'Reilly Media, Inc., the following query would work:

(BOOKTITLE LIKE XML) AND (PUBLISHER=O'Reilly)

By changing the operator, the example query can return all books with "XML" in the title that weren't published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.:

(BOOKTITLE LIKE XML) NOT (PUBLISHER=O'Reilly)

Encoding Queries

Because these queries will be part of a URL for request, they need to be properly escaped, or URLEncoded. Characters like spaces, parenthesis, and the equals sign need to be converted to theirhexadecimall numeric value. For a space, that's %20. Luckily all programming environments have shortcuts to encoding strings for URLs. Here are some quick examples in three scripting languages that escape the query and use it to build a request URL:

ASP (VBScript)

Active Server Pages has a built-in Server function called URLEncode.

baseurl = "http://safari.oreilly.com/xmlapi/?search="
q = "BOOKTITLE LIKE XML"
q = Server.URLEncode(q)

'build the request URL
requesturl = baseurl & q

PHP

PHP also has a built-in function called urlencode().

$baseurl = "http://safari.oreilly.com/xmlapi/?search=";
$q = "BOOKTITLE LIKE XML";
$q = urlencode($q);

//build the request URL
$requesturl = $baseurl . $q;

Perl

Perl doesn't have a built-in function, but the URI::Escape module is available with most Perl installations.

use URI::Escape;
my $baseurl = "http://safari.oreilly.com/xmlapi/?search=";
my $q = "BOOKTITLE LIKE XML";
$q = uri_escape($q);

#build the request URL
my $requesturl = $baseurl . $q;