Text search parsers are responsible for splitting raw document text into_tokens_and identifying each token's type, where the set of possible types is defined by the parser itself. Note that a parser does not modify the text at all — it simply identifies plausible word boundaries. Because of this limited scope, there is less need for application-specific custom parsers than there is for custom dictionaries. At presentPostgreSQLprovides just one built-in parser, which has been found to be useful for a wide range of applications.
The built-in parser is namedpg_catalog.default
. It recognizes 23 token types, shown inTable 12.1.
Table 12.1. Default Parser's Token Types
Alias | Description | Example |
---|---|---|
The parser's notion of a“letter”is determined by the database's locale setting, specificallylc_ctype
. Words containing only the basic ASCII letters are reported as a separate token type, since it is sometimes useful to distinguish them. In most European languages, token typesword
andasciiword
should be treated alike.
email
does not support all valid email characters as defined by RFC 5322. Specifically, the only non-alphanumeric characters supported for email user names are period, dash, and underscore.
It is possible for the parser to produce overlapping tokens from the same piece of text. As an example, a hyphenated word will be reported both as the entire word and as each component:
This behavior is desirable since it allows searches to work for both the whole compound word and for components. Here is another instructive example:
asciiword
Word, all ASCII letters
elephant
word
Word, all letters
mañana
numword
Word, letters and digits
beta1
asciihword
Hyphenated word, all ASCII
up-to-date
hword
Hyphenated word, all letters
lógico-matemática
numhword
Hyphenated word, letters and digits
postgresql-beta1
hword_asciipart
Hyphenated word part, all ASCII
postgresql
in the contextpostgresql-beta1
hword_part
Hyphenated word part, all letters
lógico
ormatemática
in the contextlógico-matemática
hword_numpart
Hyphenated word part, letters and digits
beta1
in the contextpostgresql-beta1
email
Email address
foo@example.com
protocol
Protocol head
http://
url
URL
example.com/stuff/index.html
host
Host
example.com
url_path
URL path
/stuff/index.html
, in the context of a URL
file
File or path name
/usr/local/foo.txt
, if not within a URL
sfloat
Scientific notation
-1.234e56
float
Decimal notation
-1.234
int
Signed integer
-1234
uint
Unsigned integer
1234
version
Version number
8.3.0
tag
XML tag
<a href="dictionaries.html">
entity
XML entity
&
blank
Space symbols
(any whitespace or punctuation not otherwise recognized)