search-challenge-cli v1.0.3

Zendesk (Melbourne) Coding Challenge

Search CLI

An efficient command line search tool for arrays of JSON objects.

Below you will find some information on how to setup and perform common tasks.

Installation

npm install -g search-challenge-cli

alternatively, you can download this repository and install from source.

git clone https://github.com/ChrisMcDonaldJ/search-challenge-cli.git
cd search-challenge-cli
npm install

CLI Usage

Usage: search-challenge-cli search <text> <file> <index>

  Options:

    --key <key>                         specify unique key of each object, by default this is '_id'.
    --indexStrategy <indexStrategy>     specify how you wish to index data, by default this is 'PrefixIndexStrategy'.
    --caseSensitive                     specify if you want the searches to be case sensitive.

Features

Tokenization

Tokenization is the process of breaking text (e.g. sentences) into smaller, searchable tokens (e.g. words or parts of words).

Stemming

Stemming is the process of reducing search tokens to their root (or "stem") so that searches for different forms of a word will still yield results. For example "search", "searching" and "searched" can all be reduced to the stem "search".

Stop Words

Stop words are very common (e.g. a, an, and, the, of) and are often not semantically meaningful.

Index strategy

There are three index strategies.

PrefixIndexStrategy indexes for prefix searches. (e.g. the term "cat" is indexed as "c", "ca", and "cat" allowing prefix search lookups).

search-challenge-cli search 'Lee Davidson' ./src/data/users.json name --indexStrategy PrefixIndexStrategy

AllSubstringsIndexStrategy indexes for all substrings. In other word "c", "ca", "cat", "a", "at", and "t" all match "cat".

search-challenge-cli search 'Lee Davidson' ./src/data/users.json name --indexStrategy AllSubstringsIndexStrategy

ExactWordIndexStrategy indexes for exact word matches. For example "bob" will match "bob jones" (but "bo" will not).

search-challenge-cli search 'Francisca Rasmussen' ./src/data/users.json name --indexStrategy ExactWordIndexStrategy