You might want to consider the start of this tutorial.

Short introductions to other TF datasets:

• Dead Sea Scrolls,
• Old Babylonian Letters,

or the

• Q'uran

Search Introduction¶

Search in Text-Fabric is a template based way of looking for structural patterns in your dataset.

It is inspired by the idea of topographic query, as worked out in MQL which has been implemented in Emdros. See also pitfalls of MQL

Within Text-Fabric we have the unique possibility to combine the ease of formulating search templates for complicated syntactical patterns with the power of programmatically processing the results.

This notebook will show you how to get up and running.

See the notebook searchFromMQL for examples how MQL queries can be expressed in Text-Fabric search.

Alternative for hand-coding¶

Search is a powerful feature for a wide range of purposes.

Quite a bit of the implementation work has been dedicated to optimize performance. Yet I do not pretend to have found optimal strategies for all possible search templates. Some search tasks may turn out to be somewhat costly or even very costly.

That being said, I think search might turn out helpful in many cases, especially by reducing the amount of hand-coding needed to work with special subsets of your data.

Easy command¶

Search is as simple as saying (just an example)

results = A.search(template)
A.show(results)

See all ins and outs in the search template docs.

Incantation¶

The ins and outs of installing Text-Fabric, getting the corpus, and initializing a notebook are explained in the start tutorial.

Basic search command¶

We start with the most simple form of issuing a query. Let's look for the proper nouns in 1 Samuel. We also want to show the clauses in which they occur.

All work involved in searching takes place under the hood.

We have the results. We only need to display them. Here are the first few in a table:

The hyperlinks in the p column point to SHEBANQ, to the verse most relevant to the individual results.

The columns with the book is not very informative. We can leave it out. You can leave columns out by passing skipCols=xxx where xxx is a set of numbers, which may also be passed as a space-separated string of numbers.

Note that the book column is the first column (starting after the p column, coounting starts at 1).

Here is the first one in a pretty display:

We are going to do some more work where we want to skip column 1, so we make that the temporary default:

Now we show a few results without the book column:

or, stopping at the clause level:

We can view result in phonetic representation as well:

We are done with this query and its results. We reset the skipCols parameter.

Condense results¶

There are two fundamentally different ways of presenting the results: condensed and uncondensed.

In uncondensed view, all results are listed individually. You can keep track of which parts belong to which results. The display can become unwieldy.

This is the default view, because it is the straightest, most logical, answer to your query.

In condensed view all nodes of all results are grouped in containers first (e.g. verses), and then presented container by container. You loose the information of what parts belong to what result.

Here is an example of the difference.

Note that you can have comments in a search template. Comment lines start with a %.

The book, chapter, verse columns are completely uninformative, so:

There are two plural and three singular words in Genesis 1:1. Search templates do not specify order, so all six combinations qualify as results.

Let's expand the results display:

As you see, the results are listed per result tuple, even if they occur all in the same verse. This way you can keep track of what exactly belongs to each result.

Now in condensed mode:

Here we have all words of all results in one display. But we cannot see that each results has two words, let alone which ones.

Custom highlighting¶

Note that we can apply different highlight colors to different parts of the result. The words in the pair are member 5 and 6 of the result tuples. The members that we do not map, will not be highlighted. The members that we map to the empty string will be highlighted with the default color.

NB: Choose your colors from the CSS specification.

Color mapping works best for uncondensed results. If you condense results, some nodes may occupy different positions in different results. It is unpredictable which color will be used for such nodes:

You can specify to what container you want to condense. By default, everything is condensed to verses.

Let's change that to phrases:

Constraining order¶

You can stipulate an order on the words in your template. You only have to put a relational operator between them. Say we want only results where the plural follows the singular.

Note that we keep the skipCols="1 2 3" display setting in force, since it is relevant for this query as well.

We can also require the words to be adjacent.

Custom feature display¶

We would like to see the gender, number and person for words. The way to do that, is to perform a A.prettySetup(features) first.

The features without meaningful values have been left out. We can also change that by passing a set of values we think are not meaningful. The default set is

{None, 'NA', 'none', 'unknown'}

This makes clear that it is convenient to keep None in the noneValues:

We can even choose to suppress other values, e.g. the male gender values and the singular number values.