Fulltext searching array of strings

Question

I have a PHP array of strings: ie: "Big green car parked outside"..etc

I would like to perform boolean search operations on these strings, similar to MySQL fulltext searching , or Sphinx Searching.

For example, I would like to find all strings containing word "green" but not "car"

Does anyone know of any existing PHP classes or libraries which would help me accomplish this ? Or can anyone suggest any google terms I could search for ?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

double preg_match() function may be help you?

Answer 2

The PHP function array_filter() will do the trick here.

function greennotcar($v)
{
    if(strpos($v, " green ") === false)
        return false
    if(strpos($v, " car ") !== false)
        return false
    return true
}

$newarray = array_filter($array, "greennotcar");

This checks if the string contains green, if it doesn't, exclude it from the array. Then, it checks if it contains car, if it does, exclude it. Otherwise, include it.

EDIT: I added spaces in the strings so you wouldn't match cart as well as car, for example. This is all up to your own preference.

Answer 3

I don't know any existing standalone solution that can work directly with variables. You could code your own implementation using PCRE, str_word_count and other string/array functions. The resources are there. Inspiration may come as well from the approaches taken in some open source apps, like Dokuwiki's full-text search functions.

A more powerful solution (including an indexing process) could be Zend_Search_Lucene:

Zend_Search_Lucene is a general purpose text search engine written entirely in PHP 5. Since it stores its index on the filesystem and does not require a database server, it can add search capabilities to almost any PHP-driven website. Zend_Search_Lucene supports the following features:

• Ranked searching - best results returned first
• Many powerful query types: phrase queries, boolean queries, wildcard queries, proximity queries, range queries and many others.
• Search by specific field (e.g., title, author, contents)