Xapian is an Open Source Search Engine Library written in C++. It has Ruby bindings, but they’re generated with SWIG, so they basically just mirror the C++ bindings – not very Ruby-like (and pretty ugly).
Being a self-confessed full text indexing nerd and a Ruby-lover, I wrote Xapian Fu: a library to provide access to Xapian that is more in line with “The Ruby Way”.
I started writing Xapian Fu exactly a year ago today but left it for a couple of months, then restarted work on it on the train on the way back from the 2009 Scotland on Rails conference. Development was test driven, so it’s got an extensive test suite (using rspec). Documentation is in rdoc and is quite detailed. As of the latest version, it supports Ruby 1.9 too.
Xapian Fu basically gives you a Hash interface to Xapian – so you get a persistent Hash with full text indexing built in (and ACID transactions!).
Example
For example, create a database called example.db, put three documents into it and search them and print the results:
require 'xapian-fu'
include XapianFu
db = XapianDb.new(:dir => 'example.db', :create => true,
:store => [:title, :year])
db << { :title => 'Brokeback Mountain', :year => 2005 }
db << { :title => 'Cold Mountain', :year => 2004 }
db << { :title => 'Yes Man', :year => 2008 }
db.flush
db.search("mountain").each do |match|
puts match.values[:title]
end
There are of course a whole bunch more examples in the documentation.
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John Leach is a human being living in Leeds, UK.