[Zope] ZCatalog searching questions

[Stuart 'Zen' Bishop]

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Michel Pelletier wrote:

> Some people thing, 'why not use re (the Python regex module)?', because
> searching like '*ing' would require iterating over all the keys, a
> linear search like this could take multiple order of maginitude more
> time than a non-regex search.

But this is not a problem for many of us who arn't trying to index libraries.
Perhaps a way of specifying 'extended' searches to ZCatalog (but still
allowing normal, quick searches), implemented as a linear regex search 
through the index. And if this was too slow for some people, it 
would provide the hook they need to replace Catalog with something that 
met their requirements:

    GlimpseCatalog - indexes are dumped to text files that are indexed using
		     Glimpse. Extended syntax would be the fuzzy regexp based
		     matches used by Glimpse (as implemented by agrep) for
		     those sites whose visitors can't spell :-)

    RDBCatalog - indexes are stored in a backend RDBMS, and substring matches
		 are done using SQL.
    
    ConTextCatalog - interfaces to Oracle and the ConText option for people
		     who require funky soundex matches and the various wierd
		     options it provides.

And Ultraseek uses python doesn't it? Might be a trivial mating.

 ___
   //     Zen (alias Stuart Bishop)     Work: zen@cs.rmit.edu.au
  // E N  Senior Systems Alchemist      Play: zen@shangri-la.dropbear.id.au
 //__     Computer Science, RMIT 	 WWW: http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~zen