What is Reddit's opinion of SymbolHound?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

What I find funny about this is that you cannot accurately Google a lot of programming constructs as it ignores symbols. When I need to search for symbols, for example "=== vs ==" I use http://symbolhound.com/

You can't search google for special characters ;)

~~DuckDuckGo supports it though(there are a few others e.g. SymbolHound).~~

SymbolHound supports it.
If DuckDuckGo is your primary search engine you can search for "!symbolhound c# | vs ||"

Edit: You could rephrase it to "c# bitwise or vs logical"

I agree that it's incredibly annoying. You'd think that there'd at least be some kind of advanced search to make symbols count, but nope. It's not even as simple as symbols being outright ignored. Searching c++ gets very different results from c, yet c ++ and c get the same results (and nothing about the ++ operator).

If you haven't heard of it before, Symbolhound can search for symbols. The downside is that it's not that good at searching. Eg, searching if you search c ++, you won't get any pages about the operator in the top results (most of the top results are typos of C++).

Yes. All the time.

Also, there is another search engine exists: SymbolHound. It's not perfect, it doesn't replace google but unlike google (and many other search engines), it doesn't strip signs or some words from search query. It's extremely useful when you need to use some piece of code as search query.

I think code search was a great service, but it was a shame it ONLY searched source code. If you could search the web with google for code without having it strip out special characters like $ and <, it would be a lot easier to find relevant tutorials and answers on sites like stackoverflow, which is often more useful than source code.

SymbolHound is the only search engine I know of that doesn't ignore special characters: http://symbolhound.com/

Full disclosure: I am a co-founder and developer of SymbolHound. It just launched a few weeks ago, so I'd love any feedback on how to improve it (biggest point so far: increase the size of the index. Currently results are mostly stackoverflow pages.)

I agree, I've had this problem too.

There are two good solutions, though:

• http://symbolhound.com/ is a search engine just for this
• Sometimes you can get Google to work by using escapes (so "c# =\>") or quoting the symbols

One is basic Haskell syntax, which I'd hope people would take a moment to familiarize themselves with before trying to do anything. For everything else, there's symbolhound and hoogle.

My basic point is that control flow is no more obscure in Haskell than it is in your imperative language of choice. Your language just happen to treat my >> and >>= as built-in syntax.

What is the significance of </> that is depicted in the artwork

I discovered http://symbolhound.com/ as a search engine can handle special characters, and the search results show it in some code (can't tell what language) and as closing tags in HTML, but that doesn't help me understand it's significance.

What makes you like it? := doesn't scream assignment to me, just "funny/weird equals". I think I've seen it around, and not from Pascal, though.

It looks like it's also used in Haskell and VB.net

I like SymbolHound for queries with characters that take on a new meaning in a programming context. Like if I forgot how to use ? : and couldn't remember what it is called.

DuckDuckGo seems to be pretty reliable with these types of queries too, but I just tried one that sent me to another site instead of displaying search results: !$

Here's the SymbolHound results for the same search

Yes, you're right. <code>BigDecimal.add</code> is so much nicer than <code>operator+</code>.

So the issue here is there's no such thing as "plain" Scala. I should put these on a flying banner message or something:

1. Scala has no operators, only methods. So the place to look for weird "operators" is on the object to the left, unless the "operator" ends with a :, in which case look on the object to the right.
2. In Scala, implicits are often used to retroactively add methods to objects that don't have them, so you should be aware of what implicits are in scope any time you see an unfamiliar method that you want to look up.
3. SymbolHound is your friend. :-)

To answer the specific question, <+= adds a value to a Setting that holds a sequence, and the value depends on the value of some other Setting. For example:

libraryDependencies <+= sbtVersion("com.github.siasia" %% "xsbt-web-plugin" % _)

sbtVersion is itself a Setting in sbt, so this says, in effect, "add a dependency on the artifact from group com.github.siasia named xsbt-web-plugin of whatever version sbt says it is."

It usually gives the right results, but I'm not sure what's going on under the hood. Sometimes it acts like it sees punctuation characters, sometimes it doesn't. Symbolhound exists specifically for this problem, but the results aren't always great there either.

http://symbolhound.com/?q=std%3A%3Alist

1. http://symbolhound.com/ - Google doesn't recognize some of your most used programming symbols. SymbolHound does.

2. https://www.desmos.com/calculator - "Which curve would I get from this formula?" / "Which formula am I looking for?"

3. http://www.quickdiff.com/ - It is a life saver when you need to compare two texts or scripts.

If you have future questions like this, there's a search engine for it! It's called SymbolHound and it works quite well.

Here's an example query with your question.

Not really answering your question, and this isn't really the best way to go about answering such a question (searching man is, for the record), but there's a search engine called SymbolHound which searches for exact, identical occurrences of the search string, including all special characters etc.

I've often found it useful when playing with symbol-intensive programming languages.

>As you can imagine, Googling for "->" isn't very helpful.

I made a search engine, SymbolHound, for just this reason. It looks like it gives good results for that search: http://symbolhound.com/?q=-%3E+operator+name

It just launched a month ago.

Here's one for your list, a great search engine for searching code specific problems, unfortunately Google strips a lot of characters from its search so this is very helpful at times.

http://symbolhound.com/

> SymbolHound is a search engine that doesn't ignore special characters. This means you can easily search for symbols like &, %, and π. We hope SymbolHound will help programmers find information about their chosen languages and frameworks more easily.

Try it,

site:github.com "<"

Check if any of the profiles show up. Those pages only have a list of projects.

&nbsp;

Edit

Here, a link from Google,

https://www.google.com/intl/en_us/insidesearch/tipstricks/all.html#punctuation

> Don't worry about punctuation > > Search ignores punctuation. This includes @#%^*()=[]\ and other special characters.

&nbsp;

As a developer it sucks. When I need to search for code or whatever, I use symbolhound, http://symbolhound.com/

As an aside since people have answered your question, if you want to search for what symbols do in a programming language use symbol hound instead of google as google just ignores any symbols you search for.

Generally topic + "rule" gets you there, but that also requires you to know or figure out the topic name, which can be tricky. If you need to search special characters you can use http://symbolhound.com/, but it's mainly indexed for programming, so it doesn't work well outside of that.

TBH google is trash,

I almost exclusively use https://duckduckgo.com/ (instead of regular google) and http://symbolhound.com/ (works with symbols, never google programming stuff, symbolhound it).

I also use bing a lot ^^^^^^^^^^for ^^^^^^^^^^porn

Perhaps SymbolHound will come in handy; it supports searching with special characters.

In your case, this reference turns up which lists the meanings of every operator in PHP. It definitely looks like it was PHP, as no other languages pop up in the results.

For future reference, it's a bad idea to have something in your code that you have no idea about.

You can do a search for 'double star Python'. In this case, searching for "kwargs" would have worked as well, since it's a common name for that parameter. In other cases, you can search for syntax using SymbolHound.

Python allows keyword arguments, where you pass some arguments by name instead of order. Having a **kwargs parameter allows you to take arbitrary keyword arguments, instead of specifying each one. It's usually used when you plan to forward them to another function and don't need to know exactly which names to specify.

Read more: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36901/what-does-double-star-asterisk-and-star-asterisk-do-for-parameters

If you haven't found it yet, after a quick search on google, I found the save location for me is in:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\userdata\45585707\282070\remote

Replace 45585707 with whatever you have. (it's some sort of user identifier I think)

I took a quick look + some searching and it looks like the save file might be in HTML numerical format, which you might be able to convert into chars. I don't know too much about this type of format, if you don't either, maybe try starting from searching http://symbolhound.com/?q=%26%23

As a supplement to existing answers:

• You can search for punctuation symbols on Symbol Hound. It's designed for searching code, and that's what it mainly turns up in this case, but in other situations it might be handy, you never know.

• Emoji are specific features of Unicode wherein the symbol is actually <em>a character</em>. This sort of symbol, made up of standard punctuation symbols, is more properly called an emoticon.