Navigation

Operators and Keywords

Function List:

C++ API

: lookfor str
: lookfor -all str
: [fcn, help1str] = lookfor (str)
: [fcn, help1str] = lookfor ("-all", str)

Search for the string str in the documentation of all functions in the current function search path.

By default, lookfor looks for str in just the first sentence of the help string for each function found. The entire help text of each function can be searched by using the "-all" argument. All searches are case insensitive.

When called with no output arguments, lookfor prints the list of matching functions to the terminal. Otherwise, the output argument fcns contains the function names and help1str contains the first sentence from the help string of each function.

Programming Note: The ability of lookfor to correctly identify the first sentence of the help text is dependent on the format of the function’s help. All Octave core functions are correctly formatted, but the same can not be guaranteed for external packages and user-supplied functions. Therefore, the use of the "-all" argument may be necessary to find related functions that are not a part of Octave.

The speed of lookup is greatly enhanced by having a cached documentation file. See doc_cache_create for more information.

See also: help, doc, which, path, doc_cache_create.

Package: octave