That feature would come in very handy. Especially because I have a rather large collection of conversations that I'd like to revisit every now and then when I'm trying to remember, clarify or expand certain points.

Is there a particular reason why that feature has not been implemented?

 

Mods and @jrap: I am in need of such a search function as well.

I have written a bash script to scrape my personal conversation pages in search of specific terms, but I haven't used it yet.

First, I wish to ensure that I am not breaking any forum rule by something that might look to the system like a bot. It will be pulling many pages very quickly, scanning every conversation and page of those conversations.

They will be pages only from my personal -- logged in -- conversations.

Please advise.

Thanks.

 

As an alternative, I can scrape all my conversations once and archive and search locally. Are there any problems with this?

 

I'll assume lack of comment for 24 hours implies permission.

Without objection, once tested and working I'll post my script here that others can use if they require a similar capability.

 

You'll need to put a cookies.txt file in the same directory. There are chrome and firefox extensions that will do this for you.

#!/bin/bash

# =============================================
# All About Circuits Conversations Regex Search
# Joeyd999@AAC March 2026
# Usage:
#   ./pms "regex_pattern"
#   ./pms "regex_pattern" conversations_list.txt
# =============================================

if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
    echo "Error: Please provide at least a regex search pattern."
    echo "Usage:"
    echo "  $0 \"your regex pattern\""
    echo "  $0 \"your regex pattern\" conversations_list.txt"
    echo ""
    echo "Examples:"
    echo "  $0 \"MOSFET|op.?amp\""
    echo "  $0 \"gain\\s*=\\s*[0-9]+\""
    echo "  $0 \"\\bdriver\\b\""
    exit 1
fi

REGEX="$1"
COOKIE_FILE="cookies.txt"
BASE_URL="https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com"
MAX_PAGES_PER_CONV=100
OUTPUT_FILE="search_results.txt"

echo "Searching with regex: '$REGEX'" | tee "$OUTPUT_FILE"
echo "Using cookies: $COOKIE_FILE" | tee -a "$OUTPUT_FILE"

# Determine source of conversations
if [ $# -ge 2 ] && [ -f "$2" ]; then
    echo "Using conversation list from file: $2" | tee -a "$OUTPUT_FILE"
    mapfile -t CONV_URLS < <(grep -vE '^\s*#|^\s*$' "$2")
    echo "Loaded ${#CONV_URLS[@]} conversation(s) from file." | tee -a "$OUTPUT_FILE"
else
    echo "Fetching list of conversations from the site..." | tee -a "$OUTPUT_FILE"
    wget --quiet \
         --load-cookies "$COOKIE_FILE" \
         --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0 Safari/537.36" \
         -O conversations_list.html \
         "$BASE_URL/conversations/" 2>/dev/null

    mapfile -t CONV_URLS < <(grep -oP 'href="(/conversations/[^"]+/)"' conversations_list.html | \
                            sed "s|href=\"|$BASE_URL|" | sed 's/"$//')
    
    rm -f conversations_list.html
    echo "Found ${#CONV_URLS[@]} conversation(s)." | tee -a "$OUTPUT_FILE"
fi

echo "----------------------------------------" | tee -a "$OUTPUT_FILE"

# Process each conversation
for conv_url in "${CONV_URLS[@]}"; do
    # Extract a readable title from the URL
    title=$(basename "$conv_url" | sed 's/-[0-9]\+\/*$//' | tr '-' ' ' | sed 's/^ *//;s/ *$//')
    [ -z "$title" ] && title="Unknown Conversation"

    echo "→ Checking: $title" | tee -a "$OUTPUT_FILE"

    page=1
    while [ $page -le $MAX_PAGES_PER_CONV ]; do
        if [ $page -eq 1 ]; then
            page_url="$conv_url"
        else
            page_url="${conv_url%/}/page-$page"
        fi

        wget --quiet \
             --load-cookies "$COOKIE_FILE" \
             --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/134.0 Safari/537.36" \
             --timeout=20 \
             -O "temp_page.html" \
             "$page_url" 2>/dev/null

        if [ ! -s "temp_page.html" ] || grep -qE "(No conversation found|could not be found|page not found|404)" "temp_page.html"; then
            rm -f temp_page.html
            break
        fi

        # Count regex matches (case-insensitive, extended regex)
        count=$(grep -Eio "$REGEX" "temp_page.html" | wc -l)

        if [ "$count" -gt 0 ]; then
            echo "   ✅ FOUND $count time(s) on page $page → $title" | tee -a "$OUTPUT_FILE"
            # Uncomment the next line to also show the direct page link:
            # echo "      Link: $page_url" | tee -a "$OUTPUT_FILE"
        fi

        rm -f temp_page.html
        ((page++))
    done
done

rm -f temp_page.html

echo "----------------------------------------" | tee -a "$OUTPUT_FILE"
echo "Search complete. Results saved to $OUTPUT_FILE" | tee -a "$OUTPUT_FILE"