[RFC] Extended searching in v4.0.0-beta

[krisk]

I recently added extended search (inspired by fzf). I'd love our thoughts 🙏

Why?

This form of advanced searching allows the user to fine-tune their results. It can be used to immediately exclude a large part of their search body before doing the final fuzzy matching. It's reminiscent of Unix-like terminal commands.

Search syntax

Fuse.js will work exactly as before, and if you give the option useExtendedSearch:true, you can use the following syntax in the search query:

Token	Match type	Description
jscript	fuzzy-match	Items that match jscript
'python	exact-match	Items that include python
!ruby	inverse-exact-match	Items that do not include ruby
^java	prefix-exact-match	Items that start with java
!^earlang	inverse-prefix-exact-match	Items that do not start with earlang
.js$	suffix-exact-match	Items that end with .js
!.go$	inverse-suffix-exact-match	Items that do not end with .go

White space acts as an AND operator, while a single pipe (|) character acts as an OR operator.

For example, this search query:

"^core go$ | js$ | py$ xy$"

is interpreted as the following logical expression:

("^core" AND "go$") OR "js$" OR ("py$" AND "xy$")

Usage

const options = {
  // Enable extended search
  useExtendedSearch: true,
  keys: [
    /*...*/
  ],
}

const fuse = new Fuse(/*...*/)
fuse.search('^jscript .python$ | ruby | !java')

---

Do we still need the previous implementation of tokenization (i.e, see #355)? With extended search, we have more useful form of fuzzy tokenization, where you could provide a pipe-delimited search query:

fuse.search("jcript | pthon | rby")

Feedback? Questions?

Please have a go at it 😄

[KWierso]

This looks great, and almost exactly what I was wanting when I filed #306!

I'm no longer directly affiliated with the project that was using Fuse that would have benefited from this, but I can probably whip up a pull request for them to switch to this and see how it actually works in real usage.

[KWierso]

Works great, too!

[krisk]

Now in the latest beta (actually v5)