circle.ch :: File indexing made with Swish-E

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2013-05-11T15:38:07

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15. September 2002

File indexing made with Swish-E
General (wiki) - urs @ 12:00:00

File indexing is a comfortable thing. I used it to index a file repository of about 14'000 html files at a size of 370MB. I was looking for an indexing machine making its index available either through scripting language available on a webserver and as a simple commandline interface. Swish-E [1] seemed to be the right thing. Latest versions come with a self-installing archive. The indexing of a directory is as simple as:

c:\>set PATH=%PATH%;c:\programme\swish-e
c:\somedir>swish-e -i .
c:\somedir>swish-e -w "word" -f index.swish-e

That is it. The most simple search in PHP using Swish-E is probably something like

<?php
system('swish-e -w "word" -f index.swish-e' );
?>

A handy class written in PHP [2] interfaces the generated index file, which is in this case nearly 80MB, and outputs the search result to the browser.

[1] http://www.swish-e.org
[2] http://www.neokraft.net/articles/swish-e/