Highlighted matched terms

[cbou]

It would be nice if Lunr.js could highlight matched terms.

[olivernn]

Do you mean being able to wrap matched terms in some markup which can be later styled, e.g.?

This is a <span class="lunr-match">matched</span> term

I think this would be cool, although currently I'm not sure it's possible. There are a couple of things that lunr needs to be doing before this can be achieved, also I think the functionality for actually marking up matched terms is probably better handled outside of lunr, in some kind of plugin.

What lunr could do is return the positions of the matches in a particular document. Currently lunr discards the position of words in the documents that it indexes. Making use of the positions of terms is something that I've been thinking about a little bit, it would allow for more powerful queries, e.g. documents with "hello" and "world" next to each other.

I think this might be a little way off yet, but its definitely something that I'm interested in adding. If you have any thoughts on implementations then I'd be glad to hear them too.

[michaelmior]

Being able to get the position of the result in a document would be great. lunr is closest thing I've found to what I need for a new project, but I really need the ability to get the position of the matched word in the document. Any pointers on where to start would be great. I assume this could be done fairly simply by changing the index format.

Anyway, once positions are tracked, I'd imagine an interface for highlighting would be fairly straightforward.

[sergey-tihon]

Agreed, highlight should be a killer feature.

[andrewwakeling]

+1. It's vital to provide context for matches especially when indexing multiple fields.

[Stephenitis]

+1. Agreed trying to make the results user friendly is top priority.

[ysadka]

+1 would be great to have this!

[EricLongpre]

+1. Having the concept of matched tokens is definitely required. This is major for expanding to awesome usability. Without it, we'd have to try and reverse engineer the search logic to attempt to show the user what exactly we found to merit the results.

[JaimeObregon]

👍

[gouldingken]

Does the matching and storing of tokens with position have to happen on the indexing side? When populating search results, you typically have the full text. The only complex part is figuring out how stemmed or other loosely matched terms are being handled. For direct matches you can basically just do a split and join on the search term, truncate it appropriately and wrap it in some styling.

Would it be possible to have a method taking the full text and search term that would return the positions? I imagine it would basically use the tokenizers and stemming algorithms to find the location for the given string. That seems simpler (and less memory intensive) than storing every token and its original position as part of the indexing process.

[julkue]

I would like to realize this with a highlighting component. However, first of we need to make sure that highlighted words and matches by lunr are exactly the same for a good usability concept. Therefore I created #200.