Preprocessing code example for searching

Students who start learning to program often find it difficult to acquire programming concepts. Among all teaching materials, code example is favoured most by both teachers and students. A number of code examples can be found in on-line resources, such as TutorialsPoint and W3School, however, there is not much work on standardising good code examples. This paper proposed a process to prepare good code example for searching. First, we will define characteristics for good code example, followed by a set of preprocessing methods for extracting and processing these characteristics for searching. To evaluate the perceived usefulness of the extracted and processed characteristics for searching, we devised a questionnaire to evaluate the perceived usefulness of the extracted and processed characteristics that will be used in the development of the code example search engine. The positive outcome of this preliminary work enabled us to start work on the code example search system to be used by novice programmers to learn programming.