XQuery/Overview of eXist search functions and operators
Overview of eXist search functions and operators
In catching up with updating from eXist-1.2.6 to eXist-1.4.x, one thing struck me. Despite eXist's elaborate documentation, I was feeling a bit lost in the myriad of overlapping search functions and their modalities (both default and fallback behaviours). I think I would feel helped with an overview grouping the different search-related functions in one place.
I don't know if this could be interesting to complete the eXist documentation; at this stage, however I'm not too sure about all functions, and maybe others may see more interesting approaches for such an overview. Therefore, I thought maybe the Wikibook could be an interesting place for such information.
The table below provides an overview, with following colour codes:
I'm not 100% sure -- all clarifications welcome!
not in eXist function documentation
| query type | index use | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| function / operator | wildcards | regex | brute force fallback | range | legacy FT | lucene FT | ngram |
| fn:matches() | x | x | x | ||||
| fn:contains(), fn:starts-with(), fn:ends-with() | x | x | |||||
| =, <, <=, >, >= | x | x | |||||
| text:match-any(), text:match-all() | x | x | |||||
| text:fuzzy-match-all(), text:fuzzy-match-any() | x | ||||||
| text:matches-regex() | x | x | x | ||||
| near(), &=, |= | x | x | |||||
| ft:query() | x | x | x | ||||
| ngram:contains(), ngram:starts-with(), ngram:ends-with() | x | ||||||