xref: /sqlite-3.40.0/ext/fts3/README.tokenizers (revision f10c535f)

1. FTS3 Tokenizers

  When creating a new full-text table, FTS3 allows the user to select
  the text tokenizer implementation to be used when indexing text
  by specifying a "tokenize" clause as part of the CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE
  statement:

    CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE <table-name> USING fts3(
      <columns ...> [, tokenize <tokenizer-name> [<tokenizer-args>]]
    );

  The built-in tokenizers (valid values to pass as <tokenizer name>) are
  "simple", "porter" and "unicode".

  <tokenizer-args> should consist of zero or more white-space separated
  arguments to pass to the selected tokenizer implementation. The
  interpretation of the arguments, if any, depends on the individual
  tokenizer.

2. Custom Tokenizers

  FTS3 allows users to provide custom tokenizer implementations. The
  interface used to create a new tokenizer is defined and described in
  the fts3_tokenizer.h source file.

  Registering a new FTS3 tokenizer is similar to registering a new
  virtual table module with SQLite. The user passes a pointer to a
  structure containing pointers to various callback functions that
  make up the implementation of the new tokenizer type. For tokenizers,
  the structure (defined in fts3_tokenizer.h) is called
  "sqlite3_tokenizer_module".

  FTS3 does not expose a C-function that users call to register new
  tokenizer types with a database handle. Instead, the pointer must
  be encoded as an SQL blob value and passed to FTS3 through the SQL
  engine by evaluating a special scalar function, "fts3_tokenizer()".
  The fts3_tokenizer() function may be called with one or two arguments,
  as follows:

    SELECT fts3_tokenizer(<tokenizer-name>);
    SELECT fts3_tokenizer(<tokenizer-name>, <sqlite3_tokenizer_module ptr>);

  Where <tokenizer-name> is a string identifying the tokenizer and
  <sqlite3_tokenizer_module ptr> is a pointer to an sqlite3_tokenizer_module
  structure encoded as an SQL blob. If the second argument is present,
  it is registered as tokenizer <tokenizer-name> and a copy of it
  returned. If only one argument is passed, a pointer to the tokenizer
  implementation currently registered as <tokenizer-name> is returned,
  encoded as a blob. Or, if no such tokenizer exists, an SQL exception
  (error) is raised.

  SECURITY: If the fts3 extension is used in an environment where potentially
    malicious users may execute arbitrary SQL (i.e. gears), they should be
    prevented from invoking the fts3_tokenizer() function.  The
    fts3_tokenizer() function is disabled by default. It is only enabled
    by SQLITE_DBCONFIG_ENABLE_FTS3_TOKENIZER. Do not enable it in
    security sensitive environments.

  See "Sample code" below for an example of calling the fts3_tokenizer()
  function from C code.

3. ICU Library Tokenizers

  If this extension is compiled with the SQLITE_ENABLE_ICU pre-processor
  symbol defined, then there exists a built-in tokenizer named "icu"
  implemented using the ICU library. The first argument passed to the
  xCreate() method (see fts3_tokenizer.h) of this tokenizer may be
  an ICU locale identifier. For example "tr_TR" for Turkish as used
  in Turkey, or "en_AU" for English as used in Australia. For example:

    "CREATE VIRTUAL TABLE thai_text USING fts3(text, tokenizer icu th_TH)"

  The ICU tokenizer implementation is very simple. It splits the input
  text according to the ICU rules for finding word boundaries and discards
  any tokens that consist entirely of white-space. This may be suitable
  for some applications in some locales, but not all. If more complex
  processing is required, for example to implement stemming or
  discard punctuation, this can be done by creating a tokenizer
  implementation that uses the ICU tokenizer as part of its implementation.

  When using the ICU tokenizer this way, it is safe to overwrite the
  contents of the strings returned by the xNext() method (see
  fts3_tokenizer.h).

4. Sample code.

  The following two code samples illustrate the way C code should invoke
  the fts3_tokenizer() scalar function:

      int registerTokenizer(
        sqlite3 *db,
        char *zName,
        const sqlite3_tokenizer_module *p
      ){
        int rc;
        sqlite3_stmt *pStmt;
        const char zSql[] = "SELECT fts3_tokenizer(?, ?)";

        rc = sqlite3_prepare_v2(db, zSql, -1, &pStmt, 0);
        if( rc!=SQLITE_OK ){
          return rc;
        }

        sqlite3_bind_text(pStmt, 1, zName, -1, SQLITE_STATIC);
        sqlite3_bind_blob(pStmt, 2, &p, sizeof(p), SQLITE_STATIC);
        sqlite3_step(pStmt);

        return sqlite3_finalize(pStmt);
      }

      int queryTokenizer(
        sqlite3 *db,
        char *zName,
        const sqlite3_tokenizer_module **pp
      ){
        int rc;
        sqlite3_stmt *pStmt;
        const char zSql[] = "SELECT fts3_tokenizer(?)";

        *pp = 0;
        rc = sqlite3_prepare_v2(db, zSql, -1, &pStmt, 0);
        if( rc!=SQLITE_OK ){
          return rc;
        }

        sqlite3_bind_text(pStmt, 1, zName, -1, SQLITE_STATIC);
        if( SQLITE_ROW==sqlite3_step(pStmt) ){
          if( sqlite3_column_type(pStmt, 0)==SQLITE_BLOB ){
            memcpy(pp, sqlite3_column_blob(pStmt, 0), sizeof(*pp));
          }
        }

        return sqlite3_finalize(pStmt);
      }