FuzzySearch

Search through your models while tolerating slight mis-spellings. If you have a Person in your database named O'Reilly, you want your users to be able to find it even if they type "OReilly" or "O'Rielly".

Installation

NOTE! The following plugin is a prerequisite: script/plugin install git://github.com/blythedunham/eload-select.git More details at http://www.snowgiraffe.com/tech/329/eager-loading-select-plugin-when-select-plays-nice-with-include/

Example

class Person < ActiveRecord::Base

...

include FuzzySearch fuzzy_search_attributes :name, :surname

...

end

people = Person.fuzzy_find "OReilly"

Fuzzy find works on scopes too. This includes named_scopes.

people = Person.scoped({:conditions => ["state='active'"]}).fuzzy_find("OReilly")

If you define a methods returning a string

def self.normalize(word)

before include the FuzzySearch than this method gets used to normlize any word. default is to downcase the string (which does only work properly within ascii)

Trigrams table

For each model that you want to fuzzy-search, you have to define a Trigram model and table, using the following example:

create_table "person_trigrams", :force => true do |t| t.integer "person_id" t.string "token", :null => false end

The PersonTrigram model itself

class PersonTrigram < ActiveRecord::Base end

==Licence and credits== This plugin is inspired by the following blog entry http://unirec.blogspot.com/2007/12/live-fuzzy-search-using-n-grams-in.html

The code is based off the act_as_fuzzy_search plugin for DataMapper by mkristian (http://github.com/mkristian/kristians_rails_plugins).

This plugin is available under the MIT Licence.