NAME DBIx::TextIndex - Perl extension for full-text searching in SQL databases SYNOPSIS use DBIx::TextIndex; my $index = DBIx::TextIndex->new({ document_dbh => $document_dbh, document_table => 'document_table', document_fields => ['column_1', 'column_2'], document_id_field => 'primary_key', index_dbh => $index_dbh, collection => 'collection_1', db => 'mysql', proximity_index => 0, errors => { empty_query => "your query was empty", quote_count => "phrases must be quoted correctly", no_results => "your seach did not produce any results", no_results_stop => "no results, these words were stoplisted: " }, language => 'en', # cz or en stoplist => [ 'en' ], max_word_length => 12, result_threshold => 5000, phrase_threshold => 1000, min_wildcard_length => 5, decode_html_entities => 1, print_activity => 0 }); $index->initialize; $index->add_document(\@document_ids); my $results = $index->search({ column_1 => '"a phrase" +and -not or', column_2 => 'more words', }); foreach my $document_id (sort {$$results{$b} <=> $$results{$a}} keys %$results ) { print "DocumentID: $document_id Score: $$results{$document_id} \n"; } $index->delete; DESCRIPTION DBIx::TextIndex was developed for doing full-text searches on BLOB columns stored in a database. Almost any database with BLOB and DBI support should work with minor adjustments to SQL statements in the module. Implements a crude parser for tokenizing a user input string into phrases, can-include words, must-include words, and must-not-include words. Operates in case insensitive manner. The following methods are available: $index = DBIx::TextIndex->new(\%args) Constructor method. The first time an index is created, the following arguments must be passed to new(): my $index = DBIx::TextIndex->new({ document_dbh => $document_dbh, document_table => 'document_table', document_fields => ['column_1', 'column_2'], document_id_field => 'primary_key', index_dbh => $index_dbh, collection => 'collection_1' }); Other arguments are optional. document_dbh DBI connection handle to database containing text documents document_table Name of database table containing text documents document_fields Reference to a list of column names to be indexed from document_table document_id_field Name of a unique integer key column in document_table index_dbh DBI connection handle to database containing TextIndex tables. Using a separate database for your TextIndex is recommended, because the module creates and drops tables without warning. collection A name for the index. Should contain only alpha-numeric characters or underscores [A-Za-z0-9_] proximity_index Activates a proximity index for faster phrase searches and word proximity based matching. Disabled by default. Only efficient for bigger documents. Takes up a lot of space and slows down the indexing process. Proximity based matching is activated by a query containing a phrase in form of: ":2 some phrase" => matches "some nice phrase" ":1 some phrase" => matches only exact "some phrase" ":10 some phrase" => matches "some [1..9 words] phrase" Defaults to ":1" when omitted. The proximity matches work only forwards, not backwards, that means: ":3 some phrase" does not match "phrase nice some" or "phrase some" db SQL used in this module is database specific in some aspects. In order to use this module with a variety of databases, so called "database module" can be specified. Default is the mysql module. Another modules have yet to be written. Names of the database modules correspond to the names of DBI drivers and are case sensitive. errors This hash reference can be used to override default error messages. Please refer to the SYNOPSIS for meaning of the particular keys and values. language Accepts a value of 'en' or 'cz'. Default is 'en'. Passing 'cz' to language activates support for the Czech language. Operates in a diacritics insensitive manner. This option may also be usable for other iso-8859-2 based Slavic languages. Basically it converts both indices data and queries from iso-8859-2 to pure ASCII. Requires module CzFast that is available on CPAN in a directory of author "TRIPIE". stoplist Activates stoplisting of very common words that are present in almost every document. Default is not to use stoplisting. Value of the parameter is a reference to array of two-letter language codes in lower case. Currently only two stoplists exist: en => English cz => Czech max_word_length Specifies maximum word length resolution. Defaults to 12 characters. result_threshold Defaults to 5000 documents. phrase_threshold Defaults to 1000 documents. decode_html_entities Decode html entities before indexing documents (e.g. & -> &). Default is 1. print_activity Activates STDOUT debugging. Higher value increases verbosity. After creating a new TextIndex for the first time, and after calling initialize(), only the index_dbh, document_dbh, and collection arguments are needed to create subsequent instances of a TextIndex. $index->initialize This method creates all the inverted tables for the TextIndex in the database specified by document_dbh. This method should be called only once when creating a new index! It drops all the inverted tables before creating new ones. initialize() also stores the document_table, document_fields, document_id_field, language, stoplist, error attributes, proximity_index, max_word_length, result_threshold, phrase_threshold and min_wildcard_length preferences in a special table called "collection," so subsequent calls to new() for a given collection do not need those arguments. Calling initialize() will upgrade the collection table created by earlier versions of DBIx::TextIndex if necessary. $index->upgrade_collection_table Upgrades the collection table to the latest format. Usually does not need to be called by the programmer, because initialize() handles upgrades automatically. $index->add_document(\@document_ids) Add all the @documents_ids from document_id_field to the TextIndex. @document_ids must be sorted from lowest to highest. All further calls to add_document() must use @document_ids higher than those previously added to the index. Reindexing previously-indexed documents will yield unpredictable results! $index->remove_document(\@document_ids) This method accepts a reference to an array of document ids as its parameter. The specified documents will be removed from the index, but not from the actual documents table that is being indexed. The documents itself must be accessible when you remove them from the index. The ids should be sorted from lowest to highest. It's actually not possible to completely recover the space taken by the documents that are removed, therefore it's recommended to rebuild the index when you remove a significant amount of documents. All space reserved in the proximity index is recovered. Approx. 75% of space reserved in the inverted tables and max term frequency table is recovered. $index->disable_document(\@document_ids) This method can be used to disable documents. Disabled documents are not included in search results. This method should be used to "remove" documents from the index. Disabled documents are not actually removed from the index, therefore its size will remain the same. It's recommended to rebuild the index when you remove a significant amount of documents. $index->search(\%search_args) search() returns $results, a reference to a hash. The keys of the hash are document ids, and the values are the relative scores of the documents. If an error occured while searching, $results will be a scalar containing an error message. $results = $index->search({ first_field => '+andword -notword orword "phrase words"', second_field => ... ... }); if (ref $results) { print "The score for $document_id is $results->{$document_id}\n"; } else { print "Error: $results\n"; } $index->unscored_search(\%search_args) unscored_search() returns $document_ids, a reference to an array. Since the scoring algorithm is skipped, this method is much faster than search(). If an error occured while searching $document_ids will be a scalar containing an error message. $document_ids = $index->unscored_search({ first_field => '+andword -notword orword "phrase words"', second_field => ... }); if (ref $document_ids) { print "Here's all the document ids:\n"; map { print "$_\n" } @$document_ids; } else { print "Error: $document_ids\n"; } $index->stat Allows you to obtain some meta information about the index. Accepts one parameter that specifies what you want to obtain. $index->stat('total_words') Returns a total count of words in the index. This number may differ from the total count of words in the documents itself. $index->delete delete() removes the tables associated with a TextIndex from index_dbh. SUPPORT FOR SEARCH MASKS DBIx::TextIndex can apply boolean operations on arbitrary lists of document ids to search results. Take this table: doc_id category doc_full_text 1 green full text here ... 2 green ... 3 blue ... 4 red ... 5 blue ... 6 green ... Masks that represent document ids for in each the three categories can be created: $index->add_mask($mask_name, \@document_ids); $index->add_mask('green_category', [ 1, 2, 6 ]); $index->add_mask('blue_category', [ 3, 5 ]); $index->add_mask('red_category', [ 4 ]); The first argument is an arbitrary string, and the second is a reference to any array of documents ids that the mask name identifies. mask operations are passed in a second argument hash reference to $index->search(): %query_args = ( first_field => '+andword -notword orword "phrase words"', second_field => ... ... ); %args = ( not_mask => \@not_mask_list, and_mask => \@and_mask_list, or_mask => \@or_mask_list, or_mask_set => [ \@or_mask_list_1, \@or_mask_list_2, ... ], ); $index->search(\%query_args, \%args); not_mask For each mask in the not_mask list, the intersection of the search query results and all documents not in the mask is calculated. From our example above, to narrow search results to documents not in green category: $index->search(\%query_args, { not_mask => ['green_category'] }); and_mask For each mask in the and_mask list, the intersection of the search query results and all documents in the mask is calculated. This would give return results only in blue category: $index->search(\%query_args, { and_mask => ['blue_category'] }); Instead of using named masks, lists of document ids can be passed on the fly as array references. This would give the same results as the previous example: my @blue_ids = (3, 5); $index->search(\%query_args, { and_mask => [ \@blue_ids ] }); or_mask_set With the or_mask_set argument, the union of all the masks in each list is computed individually, and then the intersection of each union set with the query results is calculated. or_mask An or_mask is treated as an or_mask_set with only one list. In this example, the union of blue_category and red_category is taken, and then the intersection of that union with the query results is calculated: $index->search(\%query_args, { or_mask => [ 'blue_category', 'red_category' ] }); $index->delete_mask($mask_name); Deletes a single mask from the mask table in the database. PARTIAL PATTERN MATCHING USING WILDCARDS You can use wildcard characters "%" or "*" at end of a word to match all words that begin with that word. Example: the "%" character means "match any characters" car% ==> matches "car", "cars", "careful", "cartel", .... the "*" character means "match also the plural form" car* ==> matches only "car" or "cars" The option min_wildcard_length is used to set the minimum length of word base appearing before the "%" wildcard character. Defaults to five characters to avoid selection of excessive amounts of word combinations. Unless this option is set to a lower value, the examle above (car%) wouldn't produce any results. HIGHLIGHTING OF QUERY WORDS OR PATTERNS IN RESULTING DOCUMENTS A module HTML::Highlight can be used either independently or together with DBIx::TextIndex for this task. The HTML::Highlight module provides a very nice Google-like highligting using different colors for different words or phrases and also can be used to preview a context in which the query words appear in resulting documents. The module works together with DBIx::TextIndex using its new method html_highlight(). Check example script 'html_search.cgi' in the 'examples/' directory of DBIx::TextIndex distribution or refer to the documentation of HTML::Highlight for more information. CZECH LANGUAGE SUPPORT For czech diacritics insensitive operation you need to set the language option to 'cz'. my $index = DBIx::TextIndex->new({ .... language => 'cz', .... }); This option MUST be set for correct czech language proccessing. Diacritics sensitive operation is not possible. Requires the module "CzFast" that is available on CPAN in directory of author "TRIPIE". AUTHORS Daniel Koch, dkoch@bizjournals.com. Contributions by Tomas Styblo, tripie@cpan.org. COPYRIGHT Copyright 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 by Daniel Koch. All rights reserved. LICENSE This package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, i.e., under the terms of the "Artistic License" or the "GNU General Public License". DISCLAIMER This package is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the "GNU General Public License" for more details. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Special thanks to Tomas Styblo, for proximity index support, Czech language support, stoplists, highlighting, document removal and many other improvements. Thanks to Ulrich Pfeifer for ideas and code from Man::Index module in "Information Retrieval, and What pack 'w' Is For" article from The Perl Journal vol. 2 no. 2. Thanks to Steffen Beyer for the Bit::Vector module, which enables fast set operations in this module. Version 5.3 or greater of Bit::Vector is required by DBIx::TextIndex. BUGS Uses quite a bit of memory. Parser is not very good. Documentation is not complete. Please feel free to email me (dkoch@bizjournals.com) with any questions or suggestions. SEE ALSO perl(1). CHANGES 0.11 Bug fix: HTML tags are now changed to a single space, instead of empty string when indexing document. Prevents concatenation of words in some cases. 0.10 Fixed collection table upgrade bug 0.09 Changed $MAX_WORD_LENGTH default to 20 Allow numbers to be indexed as words Use HTML::Entities to decode entities in indexed documents, on by default. Set option decode_html_entities to 0 to disable. Use $dbh->tables to check for existence of tables (caution, may not work in DBI > 1.30). 0.08 Bug fix: add_mask() was not inserting masks 0.07 UPGRADE WARNING: collection table format changed, use new method $index->upgrade_collection_table() to recreate collection table. Calling initialize() method for a new collection will also upgrade collection table. Index backup recommended. Added error_ prefix to error message column names in collection table Added version column to collection table Added language column to collection table, removed czech_language column UPGRADE WARNING: instead of new({ czech_language => 1}), use new({ language => 'cz' }) Bug fix: _store_collection_info() error if stop lists are not used unscored_search() will now return a scalar error message if an error occurs in search search() will croak if passed an invalid field name to search on Added documentation for mask operations 0.06 tripie's patch v2 updates: - a bug in document removing proccess related to incorrect 'occurency' data updates when multi-field documents were removed, was fixed. The methods remove_document() and _inverted_remove() were affected. - a bug related to wildcards in queries in form of "+word +next%" or "+word% +next%" was fixed - a bug related to "%" wildcards used while searching of multi-field documents was fixed - a bug related to stoplists and phrases that contain a non-stoplisted word together with a stoplisted word was fixed - a new full-featured solution of highligting of query words or patterns in content of resulting documents was added I've written a new module HTML::Highlight, that can be used either independently or together with DBIx::TextIndex. Its advantages include: - it makes highlighting very easy - takes phrases and wildcards into account - supports diacritics insensitive highlighting for iso-8859-2 languages - takes HTML tags into account. That means when a user searches for for example 'font', than a FONT element in does not get "highlighted". The module provides a very nice Google-like highlighting using different colors for different words or phrases. The module works together with DBIx::TextIndex using its new method html_highlight(). The module can also be used to preview a context in which query words appear in resulting documents. - the old method highlight() was not changed nor removed for sake of compatibility with old code - I put a new 'html_search.cgi' script to examples/ to show how the new highligting and context previewing works. - the HTML::Highlight module can be found on CPAN - http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/T/TR/TRIPIE/ - the new highlighting solution has been documented in a new section of the documentation tripie v1 changes: added proximity indexing - based on positions of words in a document - by default it is disabled, activate it by new option "proximity_index" - very efficient for bigger documents, much worse for small ones - it's very big (approx. 20 bytes for each word) - allows fast proximity based searches in form of: ":2 some phrase" => matches "some nice phrase" ":1 some phrase" => matches only exact "some phrase" ":10 some phrase" => matches "some [1..9 words] phrase" defaults to ":1" when omitted - the proximity matches work only forwards, not backwards, that means: ":3 some phrase" does not match "phrase nice some" or "phrase some" rewrote the word splitter and query parser - added support for czech language diacritics insensitive indexing and searching (option "czech_language") (note: changed option to "language", pass value "cz" to enable -dkoch) that is implemented by converting both the indexed data and the query from iso-8859-2 to ASCII - this can also be used for other iso-8859-2 based Slavic languages - the above is performed by my module "CzFast" that can be found on CPAN (my CPAN id is "TRIPIE"), and is optional added partial pattern matching using wildcards "%" or "*" - these wildcards can be used at end of a word to match all words that begin with that word, ie. the "%" character means "match any characters" car% ==> matches "car", "cars", "careful", "cartel", .... the "*" character means "match also the plural form" car* ==> matches only "car" or "cars" - added option "min_wildcard_length" to specify minimal length of a word base appearing before the "%" wildcard character to avoid selection of excessive amount of results added a database abstraction layer - all SQL queries were moved to separate module (see lib/ and the docs for new "db" option) and polished a bit for better maintainability and possible support of other SQL dialects added stoplists - some words that are too common (are present in almost every document) are not indexed and are removed from the search query before processing to avoid expensive processing of excessively huge result sets - user is notified when a search does not produce any results because some words he used in his query were stoplisted (no_results_stop) - stoplists can be easily localized or modified - default is not to use any stoplist, one or more stoplists can be selected using the "stoplist" option - stoplist data files are in lib/ - english (en) and czech (cz) stoplists are included - more than one stoplist can be used added a facility to remove documents from the index - check the documentation for new method "remove_document" for more info. There is no way to recover all the space taken by the documents that are being removed. This method manages to recover approx. 80% of the space. It's recommended to rebuild the index when you remove a significant amount of documents. added a facility to obtain some statistical information about the index - check the documentation for new method "stat" max_word_length, phrase_threshold and result_threshold are now configurable options added configuration options to customize/localize the error messages (no_results etc.) all new configuration options are properly stored in collection's data max_word_length limit now works much better - all words are stripped down to the maximum size before they are stored to the index, and also all query words are stripped down to the maximum word size before they are proccessed. Now when the max word length is set to, say, six and a user searches for for example "consciousness", all documents containing any words beginning with "consci" are returned Therefore the new max_word_length option is not a limit of a word size, but rather a "resolution" preference. added some comments and occasionally corrected indentation documented the enhancements bugfix: when RaiseError was set on a DBI connection, then one query which only switched off PrintError to avoid some problems, failed note: the interface was not changed - old code using this module should run without any changes Thanks for this excellent module and please excuse my inferior English ! Tomas Styblo, tripie@cpan.org 0.05 Added unscored_search() which returns a reference to an array of document_ids, without scores. Should be much faster than scored search. Added error handling in case _occurence() doesn't return a number. 0.04 Bug fix: add_document() will return if passed empty array ref instead of producing error. Changed _boolean_compare() and _phrase_search() so and_words and phrases behave better in multiple-field searches. Result set for each field is calculated first, then union of all fields is taken for final result set. Scores are scaled lower in _search(). 0.03 Added example scripts in examples/. 0.02 Added or_mask_set. 0.01 Initial public release. Should be considered beta, and methods may be added or changed until the first stable release.