How can I search for Delphi documentation? [closed]

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You can navigate to the front page of the Embarcadero documentation and search from there. The link is: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/en/Main_Page

Note that no version is included in the link. If you navigate to that link then the site will re-direct you to a version specific URL for the latest release. In this case, as I write this today, you would be re-directed to: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/RADStudio/XE5/en/Main_Page

If you wish to search documentation for a specific version, then you can supply that version in the URL.

You can type the search term into the search box at the top-left of the page, as shown in this screen capture:

enter image description here

However, the results are disappointing. Here they are:

enter image description here

Gah! Where’s the documentation for the SetLength function?

Better results are obtained if you use the Libraries section of the documentation as your portal. That is found here: http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/en/Main_Page

Navigate there are search for SetLength and the results are:

enter image description here

And this is exactly what we are looking for.

Sometimes I still start with a web search because in my experience a good web search engine can produce more relevant results. So, using Google as an example, you might try these search terms:

  • site:docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/XE5 SetLength
  • site:docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries SetLength
  • site:docwiki.embarcadero.com SetLength

As a short cut you can usually get away with typing your search term and adding docwiki and delphi. That’s usually enough to persuade the search engine to only return Embarcadero hits. So you might search for: docwiki delphi SetLength and get this result:

enter image description here

One final point. If you find yourself writing an answer here on Stack Overflow, and want to link to the documentation, you can also use the trick of removing the version from the URL. Such a URL gets re-directed to the latest version. So, continuing with SetLength, you might replace:

http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/XE5/en/System.SetLength

with

http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/en/System.SetLength

Using this approach could make your answer more future-proof.

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