What do you do when you need whole-words search in Firefox?

Question

Example: I am looking to see if "arg" is a special keyword in Lua. I go to the Lua reference manual at http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/manual.html. I search for "arg". I find hundreds of occurrences of the word "argument(s)" or "vararg".

Any ideas? I know Firefox won't implement whole words as a core feature (something about cluttering up the ui... argh...), and I couldn't find a good addon that implemented this well.

Answer 1

I usually search for something like this:

<space>arg<space>

or, in your case this would probably work

arg<space>

Its not foolproof. If there is punctuation directly after an instance of what you're looking for you would have to search for that explicitly, but for the most part it works pretty well.

Answer 2

I was very surprised to see that there isn't a current addon that supports this.

If I needed to do it without an addon I would copy the text of a page into an editor and search for the regex

/\barg\b/i

Which will find

• arg!
• "arg"
• ARG
• ¿arg?
• arg-u-ment

but would not find

• argument
• barge