[jsword-devel] regex searching

[Sijo Cherian]

What about finding terms across verse boudaries? As far as I remember the
index documents are on per verse basis. So there is no way lucene query can
find nearby words in a paragraph (across verse boundaries). Regex can help
if we string-together verses or use Passage, but like DM mentioned, it will
be slow to run regex (regex can be compiled once, but it has to run on so
many verse strings).

BTW Is anyone working on getting search result highlighting? What needs to
done besides using lucene-highlighter during the search?

-Sijo

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 11:05 PM, DM Smith <dmsmith at crosswire.org> wrote:

> JSword search indexes support the full search syntax of Lucene. This has
> some support for regular expressions. Specifically, it allows for * to mean
> zero or more characters. I think we've got the Lucene flag to allow prefix
> wild cards. Note that this is more like what a shell uses: it is not a
> modifier for the previous character.
>
> It was correctly noted that wash.*word will not search the verse as a
> whole. Lucene search is based on words. The correct pattern in Lucene would
> be wash*word, as '.' does not mean any character but rather it means a
> punctuation mark. So "wash.*word" would be split into "wash *word" and would
> find all verses with the word "wash" and any word ending with "word", such
> as "sword".
>
> The default connector for JSword is OR. It would be good to add the ability
> for a user to change it to AND. With that, "wash* word" would produce the
> expected results as it would be interpreted as "wash* AND word" instead of
> "wash* OR word". (Choice would be some thing like "Search for ALL words
> instead of ANY words.") We made OR the default because it more closely
> matched various familiar search engines, such as Google, and because it is
> the default of Lucene.
>
> Lucene does have a regular expression capability, but it is not part of
> JSword. It would be a good addition. Still, it would be based on words and
> not on the text of a verse.
>
> Adding the ability to search an arbitrary regular expression would be a
> good addition. I don't think it would be too hard to add it. Jsword already
> has the interface for any search implementation. Java's Regex is a variant
> of Perl's but has a bit more power.  There are some issues: We'll be adding
> highlighting to Lucene's search. Adding that to Regex would be a separate
> effort. The regex search would be mutually exclusive from Lucene search, so
> that would need to be made obvious. (In The SWORD Project for Windows, they
> have both it is a bit confusing as it is not clear.)
>
> And yes, it will need to go throw the "plain" text of each verse. It will
> be about as slow as creating an index. Basically, it will need to take the
> raw verse and strip the markup. (This is part of JSword already and Lucene
> indexing uses it.) And perhaps strip out the punctuation. Finally doing the
> search.
>
> If you want, add an issue or two to Jira (www.crosswire.org/bugs) under
> JSword. That way it won't be forgotten.
>
> In Christ,
>    DM
>
>
>
> On 02/23/2010 08:33 PM, Trenton D. Adams wrote:
>
>> But then again, I wonder if it's even needed, who knows.
>>
>> ----- "Trenton D. Adams"<trent.jsword at trentonadams.ca>  wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> From: "Trenton D. Adams"<trent.jsword at trentonadams.ca>
>>> To: "J-Sword Developers Mailing"<jsword-devel at crosswire.org>
>>> Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 7:29:08 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central
>>> Subject: [jsword-devel] regex searching
>>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I'm getting the impression that regular expression searching is not at
>>> all possible without implementing something that loads the books
>>> itself, and goes through each verse of the bible.  Is this true?
>>>
>>> It seems like the Lucene Index just doesn't support regular expression
>>> searches, eh?  And it also seems like SearcherFactory is currently not
>>> finished being implemented as a SearcherFactory, correct?  Or, perhaps
>>> other methods need to be added, like createSearcher(Book, Class
>>> searcherClass)???  Then you could provide another searcher type.
>>>
>>> What would be appropriate for this? adding the new
>>> SearcherFactory.createSearcher(), adding another "find" method to
>>> AbstractBook/Book that is something like "find(SearchRequest,
>>> Searcher)"???
>>>
>>> Are the books and everything abstract enough that I can search them by
>>> loading the text?  Or would I have to restrict it to the book types I
>>> know how to parse?
>>>
>>> Anything else?
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> jsword-devel mailing list
>>> jsword-devel at crosswire.org
>>> http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/jsword-devel
>>>
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> jsword-devel mailing list
>> jsword-devel at crosswire.org
>> http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/jsword-devel
>>
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> jsword-devel mailing list
> jsword-devel at crosswire.org
> http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/jsword-devel
>



-- 
Regards,
Sijo
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.crosswire.org/pipermail/jsword-devel/attachments/20100225/55fad911/attachment.html>