Search HTML Tables on Multiple Pages

userrzjP 0
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Hello Stack Overflow Community!

I am making a directory of many thousand custom mods for a game using HTML tables. When I started this project, I thought one HTML page would be slow, but adequate for the ~4k files I was expecting. As I progressed, I realized there are tens of thousands of files I need to have in these tables, and let the user search though to find what they are missing to load up a new scenario. Each entry has about 20 text entries and a small image (~3KB). I only need to be able to search through one column. I'm thinking of dividing the tables across several pages on my website to help loading speeds and improve overall organization. But then a user would have to navigate to each page, and perform a search there. This could take a while and be very cumbersome.
I'm not great at website programming. Can someone advise a way to allow the user to search through several web pages and tables from one location? Ideally this would jump to the location in the table on the new webpage, or maybe highlight the entry like the browser's search function does.

You can see my current setup here : https://www.loco-dat-directory.site/

Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction, as I'm quite confused now :-)

search directory html
3 Answers

This would be my steps, Copy all my info into an excel spredsheet, then convert that to json, then make that an array for javascript (myarray), then can make an input field, and on click an if statement if input == myarray[0].propertyName

if you want something more than an exact match, you'd need https://lodash.com/ in your project.

userjWfk10

Hacky Solution

There is a browser tool, called TableCapture, to capture data from html tables and load into excel/spreadsheets - where you are basically deferring to spreadsheet software to manage the searching.

You would have to see if:

  1. This type of tool would solve your problem - maybe you can pull each HTML page's contents manually, then merge these pages into a document with multiple "sheets", and then let people download the "spreadsheet" from your website.
  2. If you do not take on the labor above and just tell other people to do it, then you'd have to see if you can teach the people how to perform the search and do this method on their own. eg. "download this plugin, use it on these pages, search"

Why your question is difficult to answer

The reason why it will be hard for people to answer you in stackoverflow.com (usually code solutions) is that you need a more complicated solution (in my opinion) than hard coded tables and html/css/javascript.

This type of situation is exactly why people use databases and APIs to accept requests ("term": "something") for information and deliver responses ( "results": [...] ).

amurrell0

Thank you everyone for your great advice. I wasn't aware most of these potential solutions existed, and it was good to see how other people were tackling problems of similar scope. I've decided to go with DataTables for their built-in sorting and filtering : https://datatables.net/ I'm also going to use a javascript array with an input field on the main page to allow users to search for which pack their mod is in. This will lead them to separate pages on my site, each with a unique datatable for a mod pack. Separate pages will load up much quicker than one gigantic page trying to show everything.

userrzjP0
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