Fuzzily - fuzzy string matching for ActiveRecord

Show me photos of Marakech !

Here aresome photos of Marrakesh, Morroco. Did you mean Martanesh, Albania, Marakkanam, India, or Marasheshty, Romania?

Blurrily finds misspelled, prefix, or partial needles in a haystack of strings. It's a fast, trigram-based, database-backed fuzzy string search/match engine for Rails. Loosely inspired from an old blog post.

Tested with ActiveRecord (2.3, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2) on various Rubies (1.8.7, 1.9.2, 1.9.3, 2.0.0) and the most common adapters (SQLite3, MySQL, and PostgreSQL).

If your dateset is big, if you need yet more speed, or do not use ActiveRecord, check out blurrily, another gem (backed with a C extension) with the same intent.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'fuzzily'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install fuzzily

Usage

You'll need to setup 2 things:

• a trigram model (your search index) and its migration
• the model you want to search for

Create and ActiveRecord model in your app (this will be used to store a "fuzzy index" of all the models and fields you will be indexing):

class Trigram < ActiveRecord::Base
  include Fuzzily::Model
end

Create a migration for it:

class AddTrigramsModel < ActiveRecord::Migration
  extend Fuzzily::Migration
end

Instrument your model (your searchable fields do not have to be stored, they can be dynamic methods too):

class MyStuff < ActiveRecord::Base
  # assuming my_stuffs has a 'name' attribute
  fuzzily_searchable :name
end

Index your model (will happen automatically for new/updated records):

MyStuff.bulk_update_fuzzy_name

Search!

MyStuff.find_by_fuzzy_name('Some Name', :limit => 10)
# => records

Indexing more than one field

Just list all the field you want to index, or call fuzzily_searchable more than once:

class MyStuff < ActiveRecord::Base
  fuzzily_searchable :name_fr, :name_en
  fuzzily_searchable :name_de
end

Custom name for the index model

If you want or need to name your index model differently (e.g. because you already have a class called Trigram):

class CustomTrigram < ActiveRecord::Base
  include Fuzzily::Model
end

class AddTrigramsModel < ActiveRecord::Migration
  extend Fuzzily::Migration
  trigrams_table_name = :custom_trigrams
end

class MyStuff < ActiveRecord::Base
  fuzzily_searchable :name, :class_name => 'CustomTrigram'
end

Speeding things up

For large data sets (millions of rows to index), the "compatible" storage used by default will typically no longer be enough to keep the index small enough.

Users have reported major improvements (2 order of magniture) when turning the owner_type and fuzzy_field columns of the trigrams table from VARCHAR (the default) into ENUM. This is particularly efficient with MySQL and pgSQL.

This is not the default in the gem as ActiveRecord does not suport ENUM columns in any version.

License

MIT licence. Quite permissive if you ask me.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

Thanks to @bclennox and @fdegiuli for helping fix compatibility issues.