Zoom Search Engine FAQ - Troubleshooting Javascript

Q. I am getting the error message "Unterminated String Constant" when I try to load the search.html page.

This is most likely because of the occurance of foreign language words on your website, and you have not configured the search pages for the appropriate language encoding. Please visit our language support page for more information and instructions.

Q. In Netscape 7.1, I am getting a "'c' is not a registered protocol" or similar error message when I click on a link - what's wrong?

Netscape does not accept file path URLs (unlike IE) in the form of "C:\My documents\file.html". You should change your base URL to not use Windows-specific file paths, and instead, use a
base URL in the form of: "file:///C:/My documents/" which will work for all browsers.

Q. On certain browsers I am getting an "Object doesn't support this property or method" error (IE 5.2.3 on MacOS, etc.)

This error occurs when the script uses a function that is not supported by the version of Javascript in the browser you are using.

The compatibility of Javascript implementations in different browsers vary considerably, and we can not guarantee that the search script will work in all versions of browsers that claim to support Javascript (of some variety).

However, we have made an effort to make our code as cross platform as possible, there may still be some functions which could cause trouble on certain browsers. As a tip of advice, you can try disabling UTF-8 encoding (the UseUTF-8 option in the script) if you have this problem, as it often fixes most of these "missing functionality" issues since many older browsers do not support Unicode/UTF-8 Javascript functions.

Q. My browser popped up a window saying that the script is running slowly - is this normal?

Most browsers have a script timeout limit, which will give you the option to stop a script from running if it takes longer than it expects a normal script to take.

On Internet Explorer, this message is: "Stop running this script? A script on this page is causing Internet Explorer to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer may become unresponsive."

On Firefox, the message is: "A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding."

It's worth noting that IE tends to be much slower than other browser on the market such as Firefox, Opera or Chrome. A search which may run slowly in IE may run reasonably within Firefox.

This happens when any JavaScript take longer than several seconds to execute. If you are indexing a large number of pages or unique words, then it is possible that the script will take a while. JavaScript is not the ideal platform for searching a large number of words or pages. It is limited in resources and designed for less intensive tasks - but it has the benefit of convenience - being able to run entirely within a browser (which make it handy for a self-contained search function on a CD or DVD).

However, there are alternatives to using JS if you need a more powerful option, and you need to search a larger number of files than JS is capable of. See this page for more information.

Q. I am getting the error message, "dictwords is undefined" or "pageinfo is undefined", or "pagedata is undefined"

There are several possible causes for this error message:

  1. You have placed the index files (or the "Required files" listed at the end of indexing) in different folders from the search script ("search.js"). It is required that all the files listed should be placed in the same directory.
  2. You are indexing a very large number of pages or unique words and Internet Explorer (IE) has denied the resources (memory, etc) required for this search to execute. IE and most browsers restrict the amount of memory available to JavaScripts, with IE being the most restrictive and slowest in performance. You should consider an alternative to JavaScript for your CD or DVD.

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