Is it possible to query notes based on their content, section and line?

[wenlzhang]

By using native Obsidian queries, one can search for keywords within notes, under sections/headers and within lines. It would be great if Dataview can support something similar. For instance, in the where part of the query one can use something like the following to search for such keywords, just like what one can do for tasks:

.where(file => file.text.includes("Keyword"));

.where(section => section.text.includes("Keyword"));

.where(line => line.text.includes("Keyword"));

This way, one can also query notes in smaller units, i.e. sections and lines.

[blacksmithgu]

Dataview is an in-memory metadata index, so it doesn't include file contents directly since that would be equivalent to storing your entire vault in memory which would be a lot of overhead for medium-to-large vaults - if you had 400,000 notes averaging 25 lines, that could be anywhere from 800MB-2GB of data that dataview would be holding onto, which is pretty significant.

One thing I am adding to allow this use case is dv.io.read(), which will let you asynchronously load file contents which you can then scan live; the other major option is to add a search-engine style inverted word map (maps words -> pages with those words), which could then be added as a query source. I'll be looking into that in the medium term to efficiently support word and phrase searches.

[AB1908]

Yup, something along those lines should work.

[kings2u]

Is there a complete example that can illustrate this feature in action? Thank you!

[AB1908]

Can you explain which feature you're talking about? Dataview still cannot query file contents but you can write some DVJS to work around that.

[kings2u]

Can you explain which feature you're talking about?

Sorry for the delay in responding. Let's say you have a note that's an index with links to other sub-notes. I’d love to have a Dataview function that returns every line from the files linked to in the index note that contains the searched-for keyword in the Dataview query.

For example if the index note links to Note A, B, and C, and Notes A and C have multiple lines that use the word "apple," I’d want the Dataview query in the index note to display something like:

Note A
    [Heading 1 in Note A]
          [line under Heading 1 that contains the word "apple"]
    [Heading 2 in Note A]
          [line under Heading 2 that contains the word "apple"]
Note C
    [Heading 1 in Note C]
          [line that contains the word "apple"]

Is something like this possible?

[AB1908]

This is achievable with JS but sadly comes with a steep learning curve if you haven't done it before.

[pravin-d]

is this feature dv.io.read() available ? trying to query some tables in a file to create stats

[electblake]

related to #279