PyFTS

A Python interface to the OpenFTS full-text search engine

Status: the author currently uses the example web interface to search the 241 MB of email in his archive, and can find old emails much faster now.

The OpenFTS project is developing index types and functions for the PostgreSQL database which provide the ability to conduct efficient full-text searches. While their work is both important and valuable, they currently offer native programming interfaces only to users of the Tcl and Perl languages.

This package provides the beginnings of a third progamming interface, this time for the Python language. Though still under development, this Python interface can already do simple searches using the same document parsing and lexeme analysis performed by the other interfaces.

You will need to acquire PostgreSQL and OpenFTS yourself, as well as the PyGreSQL module which this library uses to communicate with the database. This package includes:

• Python extension modules which provide access to the low-level OpenFTS routines for both document parsing and English word stemming.
• A full python package built on top of these modules which provides operations for document indexing, searching, and headlining.
• An example application which will index directories full of documents for you, then let you search them either from the command line or a web browser.