# Full text search

APSW provides complete access to SQLite’s full text search extension 5, and extensive related functionality. The tour demonstrates some of what is available. Highlights include:

- Access to all the FTS5 C APIs to `register a tokenizer`, `retrieve a tokenizer`, `call a tokenizer`, `register an auxiliary function`, and all of the `extension API`. This includes the locale option added in SQLite 3.47.

- The ftsq shell command to do a FTS5 query

- `apsw.fts5.Table` for a Pythonic interface to a FTS5 table, including getting the `structure`

- A `create()` method to create the table that handles the SQL quoting, triggers, and all FTS5 options.

- `upsert()` to insert or update content, and `delete()` to delete, that both understand external content tables

- `query_suggest()` that improves a query by correcting spelling, and suggesting more popular search terms

- `key_tokens()` for statistically significant content in a row

- `more_like()` to provide statistically similar rows

- `Unicode Word tokenizer` that better determines word boundaries across all codepoints, punctuation, and conventions.

- Tokenizers that work with `regular expressions`, `HTML`, and `JSON`

- Helpers for writing your own tokenizers including `argument parsing`, and `handling conversion` between the UTF8 offsets used by FTS5 and `str` offsets used in Python.

- `SimplifyTokenizer()` can handle case folding and accent removal on behalf of other tokenizers, using the latest Unicode standard.

- `apsw.fts5` module for working with FTS5

- `apsw.fts5query` module for generating, parsing, and modifying FTS5 queries

- `apsw.fts5aux` module with auxiliary functions and helpers

- `apsw.unicode` module supporting the latest version of Unicode which can be used to ingest text into FTS5, and split, highlight, and format text results coming out:

  - Splitting text into user perceived characters (grapheme clusters), words, sentences, and line breaks.

  - Methods to work on strings in grapheme cluster units rather than Python’s individual codepoints

  - Case folding

  - Removing accents, combining marks, and using compatibility codepoints

  - Codepoint names, regional indicator, extended pictographic

  - Helpers for outputting text to terminals that understand grapheme cluster boundaries, how wide the text will be, and using line breaking to choose the best location to split lines

## Key Concepts

How it works

> A series of tokens typically corresponding to words is produced for each text value. For each token, FTS5 indexes:

> - The rowid the token occurred in

> - The column the token was in

> - Which token number it was

> A query is turned into tokens, and the FTS5 index consulted to find the rows and columns those exact same query tokens occur in. Phrases can be found by looking for consecutive token numbers.

Ranking

> Once matches are found, you want the most relevant ones first. A ranking function is used to assign each match a numerical score typically taking into account how rare the tokens are, and how densely they appear in that row. You can usually weight each column so for example matches in a title column count for more.

> You can change the ranking function on a per query basis or via `config_rank()` for all queries.

Tokens

> While tokens typically correspond to words, there is no requirement that they do so. Tokens are not shown to the user. Generating appropriate tokens for your text is the key to making searches effective. FTS5 has a tokendata to store extra information with each token. You should consider:

> > - Extracting meaningful tokens first. An example shows extracting product ids and then treating what remains as regular text.

> > - Mapping equivalent text to the same token by using the techniques described below (stemming, synonyms)

> > - Consider alternate approaches. For example the unidecode algorithm turns Unicode text into ascii text that sounds approximately similar

> > - Processing content to normalize it. For example unifying spelling so `colour` and `color` become the same token. You can use dictionaries to ensure content is consistent.

Stemming

> Queries only work with exact matches on the tokens. It is often desirable to make related words produce the same token. Stemming is doing this such as removing singular vs plural so `dog` and `dogs` become the same token, and determining the base of a word so `likes`, `liked`, `likely`, and `liking` become the same token. Third party libraries provide this for various languages.

Synonyms

> Synonyms are words that mean the same thing. FTS5 calls them colocated tokens. In a search you may want `first` to find that as well as `1st`, or `dog` to also find `canine`, `k9`, and `puppy`. While you can provide additional tokens when content is being tokenized for the index, a better place is when a query is being tokenized. The `SynonymTokenizer()` provides an implementation.

Stop words

> Search terms are only useful if they narrow down which rows are potential matches. Something occurring in almost every row increases the size of the index, and the ranking function has to be run on more rows for each search. See the example for determining how many rows tokens occur in, and `StopWordsTokenizer()` for removing them.

Locale

> SQlite 3.47 added support for locale - an arbitrary string that can be used to mark text. It is typically used to denote a language and region - for example Portuguese in Portugal has some differences than Portuguese in Brazil, and American English has differences from British English. You can use the locale for other purposes - for example if your text includes code then the locale could be used to mark what programming language it is.

## Tokenizer order and parameters

The tokenize option specifies how tokenization happens. The string specifies a list of items. You can use `apsw.fts5.Table.create()` to provide the list and have all quoting done correctly, and use `apsw.fts5.Table.structure` to see what an existing table specifies.

Tokenizers often take parameters, which are provided as a separate name and value:

    tokenizer_name param1 value1 param2 value2 param3 value3

Some tokenizers work in conjunction with others. For example the `HTMLTokenizer()` passes on the text, excluding HTML tags, and the `StopWordsTokenizer()` removes tokens coming back from another tokenizer. When they see a parameter name they do not understand, they treat that as the name of the next tokenizer, and following items as parameters to that tokenizer.

The overall flow is that the text to be tokenized flows from left to right amongst the named tokenizers. The resulting token stream then flows from right to left.

This means it matters what order the tokenizers are given, and you should ensure the order is what is expected.

## Recommendations

### Unicode normalization

For backwards compatibility Unicode allows multiple different ways of specifying what will be drawn as the same character. For example Ç can be

- One codepoint U+00C7 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C WITH CEDILLA

- Two codepoints U+0043 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C, and U+0327 COMBINING CEDILLA

There are more complex examples and description at Unicode TR15, which describes the solution of normalization.

If you have text from multiple sources it is possible that it is in multiple normalization forms. You should use `unicodedata.normalize()` to ensure your text is all in the same form for indexing, and also ensure query text is in that same form. If you do not do this, then searches will be confusing and not match when it visually looks like they should.

Form `NFC` is recommended. If you use `SimplifyTokenizer()` with `strip` enabled then it won’t matter as that removes combing marks and uses compatibility codepoints.

### Tokenizer order

For general text, use the following:

> simplify casefold true strip true unicodewords

`simplify`:

> - Uses compatibility codepoints

> - Removes marks and diacritics

> - Neutralizes case distinctions

`unicodewords`:

> - Finds words using the Unicode algorithm

> - Makes emoji be individually searchable

> - Makes regional indicators be individually searchable

### External content tables

Using external content tables is well handled by `apsw.fts5.Table`. The `create()` method has a parameter to generate triggers that keep the FTS5 table up to date with the content table.

The major advantage of using external content tables is that you can have multiple FTS5 tables sharing the same content table. For example for the same content table you could have FTS5 tables for different purposes:

- ngram for doing autocomplete

- case folded, accent stripped, stop words, and synonyms for broad searching

- full fidelity index preserving case, accents, stop words, and no synonyms for doing exact match searches.

If you do not use an external content table then FTS5 by default makes one of its own. The content is used for auxiliary functions such as highlighting or snippets from matches.

Your external content table can have more columns, triggers, and other SQLite functionality that the FTS5 internal content table does not support. It is also possible to have no content table.

### Ranking functions

You can fine tune how matches are scored by applying column weights to existing ranking functions, or by writing your own ranking functions. See `apsw.fts5aux` for some examples.

### Facets

It is often desirable to group results together. For example if searching media then grouping by books, music, and movies. Searching a book could group by chapter. Dated content could be grouped by items from the last month, the last year, and older than that. This is known as faceting.

This is easy to do in SQLite, and an example of when you would use unindexed columns. You can use `GROUP BY` to group by a facet and `LIMIT` to limit how many results are available in each. In our media example where an unindexed column named `media` containing values like `book`, `music`, and `movie` exists you could do:

    SELECT title, release_date, media AS facet
       FROM search(?)
       GROUP BY facet
       ORDER BY rank
       LIMIT 5;

If you were using date facets, then you can write an auxiliary function that returns the facet (eg `0` for last month, `1` for last year, and `2` for older than that).

    SELECT title, date_facet(search, release_date) AS facet
       FROM search(?)
       GROUP BY facet
       ORDER BY rank
       LIMIT 5;

Multiple GROUP BY work, so you could facet by media type and date.

    SELECT title, media AS media_facet,
                  date_facet(search, release_date) AS date_facet
       FROM search(?)
       GROUP BY media_facet, date_facet
       ORDER BY rank
       LIMIT 5;

You do not need to store the facet information in the FTS5 table - it can be in an external content or any other table, using JOIN on the rowid of the FTS5 table.

### Performance

Search queries are processed in two logical steps:

> - Find all the rows matching the relevant query tokens

> - Run the ranking function on each row to sort the best matches first

FTS5 performs very well. If you need to improve performance then closely analyse the find all rows step. The fewer rows query tokens match the fewer ranking function calls happen, and less overall work has to be done.

A typical cause of too many matching rows is having too few different tokens. If tokens are case folded, accent stripped, and stemmed then there may not be that many different tokens.

Initial indexing of your content will take a while as it involves a lot of text processing. Profiling will show bottlenecks.

### Outgrowing FTS5

FTS5 depends on exact matches between query tokens and content indexed tokens. This constrains search queries to exact matching after optional steps like stemming and similar processing.

If you have a large amount of text and want to do similarity searching then you will need to use a solution outside of FTS5.

The approach used is to convert words and sentences into a fixed length list of floating point values - a vector. To find matches, the closest vectors have to be found to the query which approximately means comparing the query vector to all of the content vectors finding the smallest overall difference. This is highly parallel with implementations using hardware/GPU functionality.

Producing the vectors requires access to a multi-gigabyte model, either locally or via a networked service. In general the bigger the model, the better vectors it can provide. For example a model will have been trained so that the vectors for `runner` and `jogger` are close to each other, while `orange` is further away.

This is all well outside the scope of SQLite and FTS5.

The process of producing vectors is known as word embedding and sentence embedding. Gensim is a good package to start with, with its tutorial giving a good overview of what you have to do.

## Available tokenizers

SQLite includes 4 builtin tokenizers while APSW provides several more.

Name | Purpose
--- | ---
`unicode61` | SQLite builtin using Unicode categories to generate tokens
`ascii` | SQLite builtin using ASCII to generate tokens
`porter` | SQLite builtin wrapper applying the porter stemming algorithm to supplied tokens
`trigram` | SQLite builtin that turns the entire text into trigrams. Note it does not turn tokens into trigrams, but the entire text including all spaces and punctuation.
`UnicodeWordsTokenizer()` | Use Unicode algorithm for determining word segments.
`SimplifyTokenizer()` | Wrapper that transforms the token stream by neutralizing case, and removing diacritics and similar marks
`RegexTokenizer()` | Use `regular expressions` to generate tokens
`RegexPreTokenizer()` | Use `regular expressions` to find tokens (eg identifiers) and use a different tokenizer for the text between the regular expressions
`NGramTokenizer()` | Generates ngrams from the text, where you can specify the sizes and unicode categories. Useful for doing autocomplete as you type, and substring searches. Unlike `trigram` this works on units of Unicode grapheme clusters not individual codepoints.
`HTMLTokenizer()` | Wrapper that converts HTML to plan text for a further tokenizer to generate tokens
`JSONTokenizer()` | Wrapper that converts JSON to plain text for a further tokenizer to generate tokens
`SynonymTokenizer()` | Wrapper that provides additional tokens for existing ones such as `first` for `1st`
`StopWordsTokenizer()` | Wrapper that removes tokens from the token stream that occur too often to be useful, such as `the` in English text
`TransformTokenizer()` | Wrapper to transform tokens, such as when stemming.
`QueryTokensTokenizer()` | Wrapper that recognises `apsw.fts5query.QueryTokens` allowing queries using tokens directly. This is useful if you want to add tokens directly to a query without having to find the text to produce the token.
`StringTokenizer()` | A decorator for your own tokenizers so that they operate on `str`, with the decorator performing the mapping to UTF8 byte offsets for you. If you have a string and want to call another tokenizer, use `string_tokenize()`.

## Third party libraries

There are several libraries available on PyPI that can be `pip` installed (pip name in parentheses). You can use them with the tokenizers APSW provides.

### NLTK (nltk)

Natural Language Toolkit has several useful methods to help with search. You can use it do stemming in many different languages, and different algorithms:

    stemmer = apsw.fts5.TransformTokenizer(
      nltk.stem.snowball.EnglishStemmer().stem
    )
    connection.register_fts5_tokenizer("english_stemmer", english_stemmer)

You can use wordnet to get synonyms:

    from nltk.corpus import wordnet

    def synonyms(word):
      return [syn.name() for syn in wordnet.synsets(word)]

    wrapper = apsw.fts5.SynonymTokenizer(synonyms)
    connection.register_fts5_tokenizer("english_synonyms", wrapper)

### Snowball Stemmer (snowballstemmer)

Snowball is a successor to the Porter stemming algorithm (included in FTS5), and supports many more languages. It is also included as part of nltk:

    stemmer = apsw.fts5.TransformTokenizer(
      snowballstemmer.stemmer("english").stemWord
    )
    connection.register_fts5_tokenizer("english_stemmer", english_stemmer)

### Unidecode (unidecode)

The algorithm turns Unicode text into ascii text that sounds approximately similar:

    transform = apsw.fts5.TransformTokenizer(
      unidecode.unidecode
    )

    connection.register_fts5_tokenizer("unidecode", transform)

## Available auxiliary functions

SQLite includes 3 builtin auxiliary functions, with APSW providing some more.

Name | Purpose
--- | ---
`bm25` | SQLite builtin standard algorithm for ranking matches. It balances how rare the search tokens are with how densely they occur.
`highlight` | SQLite builtin that returns the whole text value with the search terms highlighted
`snippet` | SQLite builtin that returns a small portion of the text containing the highlighted search terms
`bm25()` | A Python implementation of bm25. This is useful as an example of how to write your own ranking function
`position_rank()` | Uses bm25 as a base, increasing rank the earlier in the content the search terms occur
`subsequence()` | Uses bm25 as a base, increasing rank when the search phrases occur in the same order and closer to each other. A regular bm25 rank for the query `hello world` gives the same rank for the content having those words in that order, in the opposite order, and with any number of other words in between.

## Command line tools

### FTS5 Tokenization viewer

Use `python3 -m apsw.fts5 --help` to see detailed help information. This tool produces a HTML file showing how a tokenizer performs on text you supply, or builtin test text. This is useful if you are developing your own tokenizer, or want to work out the best tokenizer and parameters for you. (Note the tips in the bottom right of the HTML.)

The builtin test text includes lots of complicated text from across all of Unicode including all forms of spaces, numbers, multiple codepoint sequences, homoglyphs, various popular languages, and hard to tokenize text.

It is useful to compare the default `unicode61` tokenizer against the recommended `simplify casefold 1 strip 1 unicodewords`.

### Unicode

Use `python3 -m apsw.unicode --help` to see detailed help information. Of interest are the `codepoint` subcommand to see exactly which codepoints make up some text and `textwrap` to line wrap text for terminal width.

## FTS5 module

`apsw.fts5` Various classes and functions to work with full text search.

This includes `Table` for creating and working with FTS5 tables in a Pythonic way, numerous tokenizers, and related functionality.

class apsw.fts5.FTS5TableStructure(name: str, columns: tuple[str], unindexed: set[str], tokenize: tuple[str], prefix: set[int], content: str | None, content_rowid: str | None, contentless_delete: bool | None, contentless_unindexed: bool | None, columnsize: bool, tokendata: bool, locale: bool, detail: Literal['full', 'column', 'none'])

  Table structure from SQL declaration available as `Table.structure`

  See the example

  columns: tuple[str]

    All column names

  columnsize: bool

    Columnsize option

  content: str | None

    External content/content less or `None` for regular

  content_rowid: str | None

    Rowid if external content table else `None`

  contentless_delete: bool | None

    Contentless delete option if contentless table else `None`

  contentless_unindexed: bool | None

    Contentless unindexed option if contentless table else `None`

  detail: Literal['full', 'column', 'none']

    Detail option

  locale: bool

    Locale option

  name: str

    Table nane

  prefix: set[int]

    Prefix values

  tokendata: bool

    Tokendata option

  tokenize: tuple[str]

    Tokenize split into arguments

  unindexed: set[str]

    Which columns are unindexed

apsw.fts5.HTMLTokenizer(con: Connection, args: list[str]) → Tokenizer

  Extracts text from HTML suitable for passing on to other tokenizers

  This should be before the actual tokenizer in the tokenizer list. Behind the scenes it extracts text from the HTML, and manages the offset mapping between the HTML and the text passed on to other tokenizers. It also expands entities and charrefs. Content inside SVG tags is ignored.

  If the html doesn’t start with optional whitespace then `<` or `&`, it is not considered HTML and will be passed on unprocessed. This would typically be the case for queries.

  `html.parser` is used for the HTML processing.

  See the example.

apsw.fts5.JSONTokenizer(con: Connection, args: list[str]) → Tokenizer

  Extracts text from JSON suitable for passing to a tokenizer

  The following tokenizer arguments are accepted:

  include_keys

    `0` (default) or `1` if keys are extracted in addition to values

  If the JSON doesn’t start with optional whitespace then `{` or `[`, it is not considered JSON and will be passed on unprocessed. This would typically be the case for queries.

  See the example.

class apsw.fts5.MatchInfo(query_info: QueryInfo, rowid: int, column_size: tuple[int], phrase_columns: tuple[tuple[int], ...])

  Information about a matched row, returned by `Table.search()`

  column_size: tuple[int]

    Size of each column in tokens

  phrase_columns: tuple[tuple[int], ...]

    For each phrase a tuple of which columns it occurs in

  query_info: QueryInfo

    Overall query information

  rowid: int

    Rowid

apsw.fts5.NGramTokenizer(con: Connection, args: list[str]) → Tokenizer

  Generates ngrams from the text

  For example if doing 3 (trigram) then `a big dog` would result in `'a b', ' bi', 'big', 'ig ', 'g d', ' do`, 'dog'`

  This is useful for queries where less than an entire word has been provided such as doing completions, substring, or suffix matches. For example a query of `ing` would find all occurrences even at the end of words with ngrams, but not with the `UnicodeWordsTokenizer()` which requires the query to provide complete words.

  This tokenizer works on units of user perceived characters (grapheme clusters) where more than one codepoint can make up one user perceived character.

  The following tokenizer arguments are accepted

  ngrams

    Numeric ranges to generate. Smaller values allow showing results with less input but a larger index, while larger values will result in quicker searches as the input grows. Default is 3. You can specify `multiple values`.

  categories

    Which Unicode categories to include, by default all. You could include everything except punctuation and separators with `* !P* !Z*`.

  emoji

    `0` or `1` (default) if emoji are included, even if categories would exclude them.

  regional_indicator

    `0` or `1` (default) if regional indicators are included, even if categories would exclude them.

  See the example.

class apsw.fts5.QueryInfo(phrases: tuple[tuple[str | None, ...], ...])

  Information relevant to the query as a whole, returned by `Table.search()`

  phrases: tuple[tuple[str | None, ...], ...]

    `Phrases from the query`

    `a OR b NOT c AND d` would result in `a, b, c, d` as 4 separate phrases.

apsw.fts5.QueryTokensTokenizer(con: Connection, args: list[str]) → Tokenizer

  Recognises a special tokens marker and returns those tokens for a query. This is useful for making queries directly using tokens, instead of pre-tokenized text.

  It must be the first tokenizer in the list. Any text not using the special marker is passed to the following tokenizer.

  See `apsw.fts5query.QueryTokens` for more details on the marker format.

apsw.fts5.RegexPreTokenizer(con: Connection, args: list[str], *, pattern: str | Pattern, flags: int = 0) → Tokenizer

  Combines regular expressions and another tokenizer

  `RegexTokenizer()` only finds tokens matching a regular expression, and ignores all other text. This tokenizer calls another tokenizer to handle the gaps between the patterns it finds. This is useful to extract identifiers and other known patterns, while still doing word search on the rest of the text.

  Parameters:

    - pattern – The regular expression. For example `w+` is all alphanumeric and underscore characters.

    - flags – Regular expression flags. Ignored if pattern is an already compiled pattern

  You must specify an additional tokenizer name and arguments.

  See the example

apsw.fts5.RegexTokenizer(con: Connection, args: list[str], *, pattern: str | Pattern, flags: int = 0) → Tokenizer

  Finds tokens using a regular expression

  Parameters:

    - pattern – The regular expression. For example `w+` is all alphanumeric and underscore characters.

    - flags – Regular expression flags. Ignored if pattern is an already compiled pattern

  See the example

apsw.fts5.SimplifyTokenizer(con: Connection, args: list[str]) → Tokenizer

  Tokenizer wrapper that simplifies tokens by neutralizing case, canonicalization, and diacritic/mark removal

  Put this before another tokenizer to simplify its output. For example:

  > simplify casefold true unicodewords

  The following tokenizer arguments are accepted, and are applied to each token in this order. If you do not specify an argument then it is off.

  strip

    Codepoints become their compatibility representation - for example the Roman numeral Ⅲ becomes III. Diacritics, marks, and similar are removed. See `apsw.unicode.strip()`.

  casefold

    Neutralizes case distinction. See `apsw.unicode.casefold()`.

  See the example.

apsw.fts5.StopWordsTokenizer(test: Callable[[str], bool] | None = None) → FTS5TokenizerFactory

  Removes tokens that are too frequent to be useful

  To use you need a callable that takes a str, and returns a boolean. If `True` then the token is ignored.

  The following tokenizer arguments are accepted, or use as a decorator.

  test

    Specify a `test`

  See the example.

apsw.fts5.StringTokenizer(func: FTS5TokenizerFactory) → Tokenizer

  Decorator for tokenizers that operate on strings

  FTS5 tokenizers operate on UTF8 bytes for the text and offsets. This decorator provides your tokenizer with text and expects text offsets back, performing the conversions back to UTF8 byte offsets.

apsw.fts5.SynonymTokenizer(get: Callable[[str], None | str | tuple[str]] | None = None) → FTS5TokenizerFactory

  Adds colocated tokens such as `1st` for `first`.

  To use you need a callable that takes a str, and returns a str, a sequence of str, or None. For example `dict.get()` does that.

  The following tokenizer arguments are accepted:

  reasons

    Which tokenize `tokenize_reasons` you want the lookups to happen in as a space separated list. Default is `QUERY`.

  get

    Specify a `get`, or use as a decorator.

  See the example.

class apsw.fts5.Table(db: Connection, name: str, schema: str = 'main')

  A helpful wrapper around a FTS5 table

  The table must already exist. You can use the class method `create()` to create a new FTS5 table.

  Parameters:

    - db – Connection to use

    - name – Table name

    - schema – Which attached database to use

  property change_cookie: int

    An int that changes if the content of the table has changed.

    This is useful to validate cached information.

  closest_tokens(token: str, *, n: int = 10, cutoff: float = 0.6, min_docs: int = 1, all_tokens: Iterable[tuple[str, int]] | None = None) → list[tuple[float, str]]

    Returns closest known tokens to `token` with score for each

    This uses `difflib.get_close_matches()` algorithm to find close matches. Note that it is a statistical operation, and has no understanding of the tokens and their meaning.

    Parameters:

      - token – Token to use

      - n – Maximum number of tokens to return

      - cutoff – Passed to `difflib.get_close_matches()`. Larger values require closer matches and decrease computation time.

      - min_docs – Only test against other tokens that appear in at least this many rows. Experience is that about a third of tokens appear only in one row. Larger values significantly decrease computation time, but reduce the candidates.

      - all_tokens – A sequence of tuples of candidate token and number of rows it occurs in. If not provided then `tokens` is used.

  column_named(name: str) → str | None

    Returns the column matching name or None if it doesn’t exist

    SQLite is ascii case-insensitive, so this tells you the declared name, or None if it doesn’t exist.

  property columns: tuple[str, ...]

    All columns of this table, including unindexed ones. Unindexed columns are ignored in queries.

  property columns_indexed: tuple[str, ...]

    All columns of this table, excluding unindexed ones

  command_delete(rowid: int, *column_values: str)

    Does delete

    See `delete()` for regular row deletion.

    If you are using an external content table, it is better to use triggers on that table.

  command_delete_all() → None

    Does delete all

    If you are using an external content table, it is better to use triggers on that table.

  command_integrity_check(external_content: bool = True) → None

    Does integrity check

    If external_content is True, then the FTS index is compared to the external content.

  command_merge(n: int) → int

    Does merge

    See the documentation for what positive and negative values of n mean.

    Returns:

      The difference between sqlite3_total_changes() before and after running the command.

  command_optimize() → None

    Does optimize

  command_rebuild()

    Does rebuild

  config(name: str, value: SQLiteValue = None, *, prefix: str = 'x-apsw-') → SQLiteValue

    Optionally sets, and gets a config value

    If the value is not None, then it is changed. It is not recommended to change SQLite’s own values.

    The prefix is to ensure your own config names don’t clash with those used by SQLite. For example you could remember the Unicode version used by your tokenizer, and rebuild if the version is updated.

    The advantage of using this is that the names/values will survive the FTS5 table being renamed, backed up, restored etc.

  config_automerge(val: int | None = None) → int

    Optionally sets, and returns automerge

  config_crisismerge(val: int | None = None) → int

    Optionally sets, and returns crisismerge

  config_deletemerge(val: int | None = None) → int

    Optionally sets, and returns deletemerge

  config_insttoken(val: bool | None = None) → bool

    Optionally sets, and returns insttoken

  config_pgsz(val: int | None = None) → int

    Optionally sets, and returns page size

  config_rank(val: str | None = None) → str

    Optionally sets, and returns rank

    When setting rank it must consist of a function name, open parentheses, zero or more SQLite value literals that will be arguments to the function, and a close parenthesis, For example `my_func(3, x'aabb', 'hello')`

  config_secure_delete(val: bool | None = None) → bool

    Optionally sets, and returns secure-delete

  config_usermerge(val: int | None = None) → int

    Optionally sets, and returns usermerge

  classmethod create(db: Connection, name: str, columns: Iterable[str] | None, *, schema: str = 'main', unindexed: Iterable[str] | None = None, tokenize: Iterable[str] | None = None, support_query_tokens: bool = False, rank: str | None = None, prefix: Iterable[int] | int | None = None, content: str | None = None, content_rowid: str | None = None, contentless_delete: bool = False, contentless_unindexed: bool = False, columnsize: bool = True, detail: Literal['full', 'column', 'none'] = 'full', tokendata: bool = False, locale: bool = False, generate_triggers: bool = False, drop_if_exists: bool = False) → Self

    Creates the table, returning a `Table` on success

    You can use `apsw.Connection.table_exists()` to check if a table already exists.

    Parameters:

      - db – connection to create the table on

      - name – name of table

      - columns – A sequence of column names. If you are using an external content table (recommended) you can supply `None` and the column names will be from the table named by the `content` parameter

      - schema – Which attached database the table is being created in

      - unindexed – Columns that will be unindexed

      - tokenize – The tokenize option. Supply as a sequence of strings which will be correctly quoted together.

      - support_query_tokens – Configure the tokenize option to allow `queries using tokens`.

      - rank – The rank option if not using the default. See `config_rank()` for required syntax.

      - prefix – The prefix option. Supply an int, or a sequence of int.

      - content – Name of the external content table. The external content table must be in the same database as the FTS5 table.

      - content_rowid – Name of the content rowid column if not using the default when using an external content table

      - contentless_delete – Set the contentless delete option for contentless tables.

      - contentless_unindexed – Set the contentless unindexed option for contentless tables

      - columnsize – Indicate if the column size tracking should be disabled to save space

      - detail – Indicate if detail should be reduced to save space

      - tokendata – Indicate if tokens have separate data after a null char

      - locale – Indicate if a locale is available to tokenizers and stored in the table

      - generate_triggers – If using an external content table and this is `True`, then triggers are created to keep this table updated with changes to the external content table. These require a table not a view.

      - drop_if_exists – The FTS5 table will be dropped if it already exists, and then created.

    If you create with an external content table, then `command_rebuild()` and `command_optimize()` will be run to populate the contents.

  delete(rowid: int) → bool

    Deletes the identified row

    If you are using an external content table then the delete is directed to that table.

    Returns:

      True if a row was deleted

  fts5vocab_name(type: Literal['row', 'col', 'instance']) → str

    Creates a fts5vocab table in temp and returns fully quoted name

  is_token(token: str) → bool

    Returns `True` if it is a known token

  key_tokens(rowid: int, *, limit: int = 10, columns: str | Sequence[str] | None = None) → Sequence[tuple[float, str]]

    Finds tokens that are dense in this row, but rare in other rows

    This is purely statistical and has no understanding of the tokens. Tokens that occur only in this row are ignored.

    Parameters:

      - rowid – Which row to examine

      - limit – Maximum number to return

      - columns – If provided then only look at specified column(s), else all indexed columns.

    Returns:

      A sequence of tuples where each is a tuple of token and float score with bigger meaning more unique, sorted highest score first.

    See the example.

    See also

    `text_for_token()` to get original document text corresponding to a token

  more_like(ids: Sequence[int], *, columns: str | Sequence[str] | None = None, token_limit: int = 3) → Iterator[MatchInfo]

    Like `search()` providing results similar to the provided ids.

    This is useful for providing infinite scrolling. Do a search remembering the rowids. When you get to the end, call this method with those rowids.

    `key_tokens()` is used to get key tokens from rows which is purely statistical and has no understanding of the text.

    Parameters:

      - ids – rowids to consider

      - columns – If provided then only look at specified column(s), else all indexed columns.

      - token_limit – How many tokens are extracted from each row. Bigger values result in a broader search, while smaller values narrow it.

    See the example.

  query_suggest(query: str, threshold: float = 0.01, *, tft_docs: int = 2, locale: str | None = None) → str | None

    Suggests alternate query

    This is useful if a query returns no or few matches. It is purely a statistical operation based on the tokens in the query and index. There is no guarantee that there will be more (or any) matches. The query structure (AND, OR, column filters etc) is maintained.

    Transformations include:

    - Ensuring column names in column filters are of the closest indexed column name

    - Combining such as `some thing` to `something`

    - Splitting such as `noone` to `no one`

    - Replacing unknown/rare words with more popular ones

    The query is parsed, tokenized, replacement tokens established, and original text via `text_for_token()` used to reconstitute the query.

    Parameters:

      - query – A valid query string

      - threshold – Fraction of rows between `0.0` and `1.00` to be rare - eg `0.01` means a token occurring in less than 1% of rows is considered for replacement. Larger fractions increase the likelihood of replacements, while smaller reduces it. A value of `0` will only replace tokens that are not in the index at all - essentially spelling correction only

      - tft_docs – Passed to `text_for_token()` as the `doc_limit` parameter. Larger values produce more representative text, but also increase processing time.

      - locale – Locale used to tokenize the query.

    Returns:

      `None` if no suitable changes were found, or a replacement query string.

  property quoted_table_name: str

    Provides the full table name for composing your own queries

    It includes the attached database name and quotes special characters like spaces.

    You can’t use bindings for table names in queries, so use this when constructing a query string:

        my_table = apsw.fts5.Table(con, 'my_table')

        sql = f"""SELECT ... FROM { my_table.quoted_table_name }
                     WHERE ...."""

  row_by_id(id: int, column: str | Sequence[str]) → SQLiteValue | tuple[SQLiteValue]

    Returns the contents of the row id

    You can request one column,, or several columns. If one column is requested then just that value is returned, and a tuple of values for more than column.

    `KeyError` is raised if the row does not exist.

    See the example.

  property row_count: int

    Number of rows in the table

  search(query: str, locale: str | None = None) → Iterator[MatchInfo]

    Iterates query matches, best matches first

    This avoids the need to write SQL. See the example.

  property structure: FTS5TableStructure

    Structure of the table from the declared SQL

  property supports_query_tokens: bool

    True if you can use `apsw.fts5query.QueryTokens` with this table

  text_for_token(token: str, doc_limit: int) → str

    Provides the original text used to produce `token`

    Different text produces the same token because case can be ignored, accents and punctuation removed, synonyms and other processing.

    This method finds the text that produced a token, by re-tokenizing the documents containing the token. Highest rowids are examined first so this biases towards the newest content.

    Parameters:

      - token – The token to find

      - doc_limit – Maximum number of documents to examine. The higher the limit the longer it takes, but the more representative the text is.

    Returns:

      The most popular text used to produce the token in the examined documents

    See the example.

  property token_count: int

    Total number of tokens across all indexed columns in all rows

  token_doc_frequency(count: int = 10) → list[tuple[str, int]]

    Most frequent occurring tokens, useful for building a stop words list

    This counts the total number of documents containing the token, so appearing 1,000 times in 1 document counts as 1, while once each in 1,000 documents counts as 1,000.

    See also

    - `token_frequency()`

    - Example

  token_frequency(count: int = 10) → list[tuple[str, int]]

    Most frequent tokens, useful for building a stop words list

    This counts the total occurrences of the token, so appearing 1,000 times in 1 document counts the same as once each in 1,000 documents.

    See also

    - `token_doc_frequency()`

    - Example

  tokenize(utf8: bytes, reason: int = apsw.FTS5_TOKENIZE_DOCUMENT, locale: str | None = None, include_offsets=True, include_colocated=True)

    Tokenize the supplied utf8

  property tokenizer: FTS5Tokenizer

    Tokenizer instance as used by this table

  property tokens: dict[str, int]

    All the tokens as a dict with token as key, and the value being how many rows they are in

    This can take some time on a large corpus - eg 2 seconds on a gigabyte dataset with half a million documents and 650,000 tokens. It is cached until the next content change.

  property tokens_per_column: list[int]

    Count of tokens in each column, across all rows. Unindexed columns have a value of zero

  upsert(*args: SQLiteValue, **kwargs: SQLiteValue) → int

    Insert or update with columns by positional and keyword arguments

    You can mix and match positional and keyword arguments:

        table.upsert("hello")
        table.upsert("hello", header="world")
        table.upsert(header="world")

    If you specify a `rowid` keyword argument that is used as the rowid for the insert. If the corresponding row already exists then the row is modified with the provided values. rowids are always integers.

    The rowid of the inserted/modified row is returned.

    If you are using an external content table:

    - The insert will be directed to the external content table

    - `rowid` will map to the `content_rowid` option if used

    - The column names and positions of the FTS5 table, not the external content table is used

    - The FTS5 table is not updated - you should use triggers on the external content table to do that. See the `generate_triggers` option on `create()`.

    See the example

class apsw.fts5.TokenizerArgument(default: Any = None, choices: Sequence[Any] | None = None, convertor: Callable[[str], Any] | None = None, convert_default: bool = False)

  Used as spec values to `parse_tokenizer_args()` - example

  choices: Sequence[Any] | None = None

    Value must be one of these, after conversion

  convert_default: bool = False

    True if the default value should be run through the convertor

  convertor: Callable[[str], Any] | None = None

    Function to convert string value to desired value

  default: Any = None

    Value - set to default before parsing

apsw.fts5.TransformTokenizer(transform: Callable[[str], str | Sequence[str]] | None = None) → FTS5TokenizerFactory

  Transforms tokens to a different token, such as stemming

  To use you need a callable that takes a str, and returns a list of str, or just a str to use as replacements. You can return an empty list to remove the token.

  The following tokenizer arguments are accepted.

  transform

    Specify a `transform`, or use as a decorator

  See the example.

apsw.fts5.UnicodeWordsTokenizer(con: Connection, args: list[str]) → Tokenizer

  Uses Unicode segmentation to extract words

  The following tokenizer parameters are accepted. A segment is considered a word if a codepoint matching any of the categories, emoji, or regional indicator is present.

  categories

    Default `L* N*` to include letters, and numbers. You should consider `Pd` for punctuation dash if you want words separated with dashes to be considered one word. `Sm` for maths symbols and `Sc` for currency symbols may also be relevant,

  emoji

    `0` or `1` (default) if emoji are included. They will be a word by themselves.

  regional_indicator

    `0` or `1` (default) if regional indicators like 🇬🇧 🇵🇭 are included. They will be a word by themselves.

  This does a lot better than the unicode61 tokenizer builtin to FTS5. It understands user perceived characters (made of many codepoints), and punctuation within words (eg `don't` is considered two words `don` and `t` by unicode61), as well as how various languages work.

  For languages where there is no spacing or similar between words, only a dictionary can determine actual word boundaries. Examples include Japanese, Chinese, and Khmer. In this case the algorithm returns the user perceived characters individually making it similar to `NGramTokenizer()` which will provide good search experience at the cost of a slightly larger index.

  Use the `SimplifyTokenizer()` to make case insensitive, remove diacritics, combining marks, and use compatibility code points.

  See the example

apsw.fts5.convert_boolean(value: str) → bool

  Converts to boolean

  Accepts `0`, `1`, `false`, and `true`

apsw.fts5.convert_number_ranges(numbers: str) → set[int]

  Converts comma separated number ranges

  Takes input like `2,3-5,17` and converts to `{2, 3, 4, 5, 17}`

apsw.fts5.convert_string_to_python(expr: str) → Any

  Converts a string to a Python object

  This is useful to process command line arguments and arguments to tokenizers. It automatically imports the necessary modules.

  Warning

  The string is ultimately `evaluated` allowing arbitrary code execution and side effects.

  Some examples of what is accepted are:

  - 3 + 4

  - apsw.fts5.RegexTokenizer

  - snowballstemmer.stemmer(“english”).stemWord

  - nltk.stem.snowball.EnglishStemmer().stem

  - shutil.rmtree(“a/directory/location”) COULD DELETE ALL FILES

apsw.fts5.convert_tokenize_reason(value: str) → set[int]

  Converts a space separated list of `tokenize_reasons` into a set of corresponding values

  Use with `parse_tokenizer_args()`

apsw.fts5.convert_unicode_categories(patterns: str) → set[str]

  Returns Unicode categories matching space separated values

  `fnmatch.fnmatchcase()` is used to check matches. An example pattern is `L* Pc` would return `{'Pc', 'Lm', 'Lo', 'Lu', 'Lt', 'Ll'}`

  You can also put ! in front to exclude categories, so `* !*m` would be all categories except those ending in `m`.

apsw.fts5.map_functions = {'position_rank': 'apsw.fts5aux.position_rank', 'subsequence': 'apsw.fts5aux.subsequence'}

  APSW provided auxiliary functions for use with `register_functions()`

apsw.fts5.map_tokenizers = {'html': <function HTMLTokenizer>, 'json': <function JSONTokenizer>, 'ngram': <function NGramTokenizer>, 'querytokens': <function QueryTokensTokenizer>, 'simplify': <function SimplifyTokenizer>, 'unicodewords': <function UnicodeWordsTokenizer>}

  APSW provided tokenizers for use with `register_tokenizers()`

apsw.fts5.parse_tokenizer_args(spec: dict[str, TokenizerArgument | Any], con: Connection, args: list[str]) → dict[str, Any]

  Parses the arguments to a tokenizer based on spec returning corresponding values

  Parameters:

    - spec – A dictionary where the key is a string, and the value is either the corresponding default, or `TokenizerArgument`.

    - con – Used to lookup other tokenizers

    - args – A list of strings as received by `apsw.FTS5TokenizerFactory`

  For example to parse `["arg1", "3", "big", "ship", "unicode61", "yes", "two"]`

      # spec on input
      {
          # Converts to integer
          "arg1": TokenizerArgument(convertor=int, default=7),
          # Limit allowed values
          "big": TokenizerArgument(choices=("ship", "plane")),
          # Accepts any string, with a default
          "small": "hello",
          # gathers up remaining arguments, if you intend
          # to process the results of another tokenizer
          "+": None
      }

      # options on output
      {
          "arg1": 3,
          "big": "ship",
          "small": "hello",
          "+": db.Tokenizer("unicode61", ["yes", "two"])
      }

      # Using "+" in your ``tokenize`` functions
      def tokenize(utf8, flags, locale):
          tok = options["+"]
          for start, end, *tokens in tok(utf8, flags, locale):
              # do something
              yield start, end, *tokens

  See also

  Some useful convertors

  - `convert_unicode_categories()`

  - `convert_tokenize_reason()`

  - `convert_string_to_python()`

  - `convert_number_ranges()`

  See the example.

apsw.fts5.register_functions(db: Connection, map: dict[str, str | Callable])

  Registers auxiliary functions named in map with the connection, if not already registered

  The map contains the function name, and either the callable or a string which will be automatically `imported`.

  See `map_functions`

apsw.fts5.register_tokenizers(db: Connection, map: dict[str, str | Callable])

  Registers tokenizers named in map with the connection, if not already registered

  The map contains the tokenizer name, and either the callable or a string which will be automatically `imported`.

  See `map_tokenizers`

apsw.fts5.string_tokenize(tokenizer: FTS5Tokenizer, text: str, flags: int, locale: str | None)

  Tokenizer caller to get string offsets back

  Calls the tokenizer doing the conversion of text to UTF8, and converting the received UTF8 offsets back to text offsets.

apsw.fts5.tokenize_reasons: dict[str, int] = {'AUX': 8, 'DOCUMENT': 4, 'QUERY': 1, 'QUERY_PREFIX': 3}

  Mapping between friendly strings and constants for xTokenize flags

apsw.fts5.tokenizer_test_strings(filename: str | Path | None = None) → tuple[tuple[bytes, str], ...]

  Provides utf-8 bytes sequences for interesting test strings

  Parameters:

    filename – File to load. If None then the builtin one is used

  Returns:

    A tuple where each item is a tuple of utf8 bytes and comment str

  The test file should be UTF-8 encoded text.

  If it starts with a # then it is considered to be multiple text sections where a # line contains a description of the section. Any lines beginning ## are ignored.

apsw.fts5.unicode_categories = {'Cc': 'Other control', 'Cf': 'Other format', 'Cn': 'Other not assigned', 'Co': 'Other private use', 'Cs': 'Other surrogate', 'Ll': 'Letter Lowercase', 'Lm': 'Letter modifier', 'Lo': 'Letter other', 'Lt': 'Letter titlecase', 'Lu': 'Letter Uppercase', 'Mc': 'Mark spacing combining', 'Me': 'Mark enclosing', 'Mn': 'Mark nonspacing', 'Nd': 'Number decimal digit', 'Nl': 'Number letter', 'No': 'Number other', 'Pc': 'Punctuation connector', 'Pd': 'Punctuation dash', 'Pe': 'Punctuation close', 'Pf': 'Punctuation final quote', 'Pi': 'Punctuation initial quote', 'Po': 'Punctuation other', 'Ps': 'Punctuation open', 'Sc': 'Symbol currency', 'Sk': 'Symbol modifier', 'Sm': 'Symbol math', 'So': 'Symbol other', 'Zl': 'Separator line', 'Zp': 'Separator paragraph', 'Zs': 'Separator space'}

  Unicode categories and descriptions for reference

## FTS5 Query module

`apsw.fts5query` Create, parse, and modify queries

There are 3 representations of a query available:

query string

> This the string syntax accepted by FTS5 where you represent AND, OR, NEAR, column filtering etc inline in the string. An example is:

>     love AND (title:^"big world" NOT summary:"sunset cruise")

parsed

> This is a hierarchical representation using `dataclasses` with all fields present. Represented as `QUERY`, it uses `PHRASE`, `NEAR`, `COLUMNFILTER`, `AND`, `NOT`, and `OR`. The string example above is:

>     AND(queries=[PHRASE(phrase='love', initial=False, prefix=False, plus=None),
>                 NOT(match=COLUMNFILTER(columns=['title'],
>                                         filter='include',
>                                         query=PHRASE(phrase='big world',
>                                                     initial=True,
>                                                     prefix=False,
>                                                     plus=None)),
>                     no_match=COLUMNFILTER(columns=['summary'],
>                                         filter='include',
>                                         query=PHRASE(phrase='sunset cruise',
>                                                         initial=False,
>                                                         prefix=False,
>                                                         plus=None)))])

dict

> This is a hierarchical representation using Python `dictionaries` which is easy for logging, storing as JSON, and manipulating. Fields containing default values are omitted. When provided to methods in this module, you do not need to provide intermediate PHRASE - just Python lists and strings directly. This is the easiest form to programmatically compose and modify queries in. The string example above is:

>     {'@': 'AND',
>     'queries': [{'@': 'PHRASE', 'phrase': 'love'},
>                 {'@': 'NOT',
>                 'match': {'@': 'COLUMNFILTER',
>                             'columns': ['title'],
>                             'filter': 'include',
>                             'query': {'@': 'PHRASE',
>                                     'initial': True,
>                                     'phrase': 'big world'}},
>                 'no_match': {'@': 'COLUMNFILTER',
>                             'columns': ['summary'],
>                             'filter': 'include',
>                             'query': {'@': 'PHRASE',
>                                         'phrase': 'sunset cruise'}}}]}

See the example.

Conversion functions
From type | To type | Conversion method
--- | --- | ---
query string | parsed | `parse_query_string()`
parsed | dict | `to_dict()`
dict | parsed | `from_dict()`
parsed | query string | `to_query_string()`

Other helpful functionality includes:

- `quote()` to appropriately double quote strings

- `extract_with_column_filters()` to get a `QUERY` for a node within an existing `QUERY` but applying the intermediate column filters.

- `applicable_columns()` to work out which columns apply to part of a `QUERY`

- `walk()` to traverse a parsed query

class apsw.fts5query.AND(queries: Sequence[COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE])

  All queries must match

  queries: Sequence[COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE]

class apsw.fts5query.COLUMNFILTER(columns: Sequence[str], filter: Literal['include', 'exclude'], query: COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE)

  Limit query to certain columns

  This always reduces the columns that phrase matching will be done against.

  columns: Sequence[str]

    Limit phrase matching by these columns

  filter: Literal['include', 'exclude']

    Including or excluding the columns

  query: COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE

    query the filter applies to, including all nested queries

class apsw.fts5query.NEAR(phrases: Sequence[PHRASE], distance: int = 10)

  Near query

  distance: int = 10

    Maximum distance between the phrases

  phrases: Sequence[PHRASE]

    Two or more phrases

class apsw.fts5query.NOT(match: COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE, no_match: COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE)

  match must match, but no_match must not

  match: COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE
  no_match: COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE

class apsw.fts5query.OR(queries: Sequence[COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE])

  Any query must match

  queries: Sequence[COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE]

class apsw.fts5query.PHRASE(phrase: str | QueryTokens, initial: bool = False, prefix: bool = False, plus: PHRASE | None = None)

  One phrase

  initial: bool = False

    If True then the phrase must match the beginning of a column (`^` was used)

  phrase: str | QueryTokens

    Text of the phrase. If + was used (eg one+two) then it will be a list of phrases

  plus: PHRASE | None = None

    Additional phrase segment, joined by `+` in queries

  prefix: bool = False

    If True then if it is a prefix search on the last token in phrase (`*` was used)

exception apsw.fts5query.ParseError(query: str, message: str, position: int)

  This exception is raised when an error parsing a query string is encountered

  A simple printer:

      print(exc.query)
      print(" " * exc.position + "^", exc.message)

  message: str

    Description of error

  position: int

    Offset in query where the error occurred

  query: str

    The query that was being processed

apsw.fts5query.QUERY: TypeAlias = apsw.fts5query.COLUMNFILTER | apsw.fts5query.NEAR | apsw.fts5query.AND | apsw.fts5query.OR | apsw.fts5query.NOT | apsw.fts5query.PHRASE

  Type representing all query types.

apsw.fts5query.QUERY_TOKENS_MARKER = '$!Tokens~'

  Special marker at the start of a string to recognise it as a list of tokens for `QueryTokens`

class apsw.fts5query.QueryTokens(tokens: list[str | Sequence[str]])

  FTS5 query strings are passed to tokenizers which extract tokens, such as by splitting on whitespace, lower casing text, and removing characters like accents.

  If you want to query tokens directly then use this class with the `tokens` member, using it where `PHRASE.phrase` goes and use `to_query_string()` to compose your query.

  Your FTS5 table must use the `apsw.fts5.QueryTokensTokenizer` as the first tokenizer in the list. If the reason for tokenizing includes FTS5_TOKENIZE_QUERY and the text to be tokenized starts with the special marker, then the tokens are returned. `apsw.fts5.Table.supports_query_tokens` will tell you if query tokens are handled correctly. `apsw.fts5.Table.create()` parameter `support_query_tokens` will ensure the `tokenize` table option is correctly set, You can get the tokens from `apsw.fts5.Table.tokens`.

  You can construct QueryTokens like this:

      # One token
      QueryTokens(["hello"])
      # Token sequence
      QueryTokens(["hello". "world", "today"])
      # Colocated tokens use a nested list
      QueryTokens(["hello", ["first", "1st"]])

  To use in a query:

      {"@": "NOT", "match": QueryTokens(["hello", "world"]),
                   "no_match": QueryTokens([["first", "1st"]])}

  That would be equivalent to a query of `"Hello World" NOT "First"` if tokens were lower cased, and a tokenizer added a colocated `1st` on seeing `first`.

  classmethod decode(data: str | bytes) → QueryTokens | None

    If the marker is present then returns the corresponding `QueryTokens`, otherwise None.

  encode() → str

    Produces the tokens encoded with the marker and separator

  tokens: list[str | Sequence[str]]

    The tokens

apsw.fts5query.applicable_columns(node: COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE, start: COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE, columns: Sequence[str]) → set[str]

  Return which columns apply to `node`

  You can use `apsw.fts5.Table.columns_indexed()` to get the column list for a table. The column names are matched using SQLite semantics (ASCII case insensitive).

  If a query column is not in the provided columns, then `KeyError` is raised.

apsw.fts5query.extract_with_column_filters(node: COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE, start: COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE) → COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE

  Return a new QUERY for a query rooted at start with child node, with intermediate `COLUMNFILTER` in between applied.

  This is useful if you want to execute a node from a top level query ensuring the column filters apply.

apsw.fts5query.from_dict(d: dict[str, Any] | Sequence[str] | str | QueryTokens) → COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE

  Turns dict back into a `QUERY`

  You can take shortcuts putting str or `QueryTokens` in places where PHRASE is expected. For example this is accepted:

      {
          "@": "AND,
          "queries": ["hello", "world"]
      }

apsw.fts5query.parse_query_string(query: str) → COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE

  Returns the corresponding `QUERY` for the query string

apsw.fts5query.quote(text: str | QueryTokens) → str

  Quotes text if necessary to keep it as one unit using FTS5 quoting rules

  Some examples:

  text | return
  --- | ---
  `hello` | `hello`
  `one two` | `"one two"`
  (empty string) | `""`
  `one"two` | `"one""two"`

apsw.fts5query.to_dict(q: COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE) → dict[str, Any]

  Converts structure to a dict

  This is useful for pretty printing, logging, saving as JSON, modifying etc.

  The dict has a key `@` with value corresponding to the dataclass (eg `NEAR`, `PHRASE`, `AND`) and the same field names as the corresponding dataclasses. Only fields with non-default values are emitted.

apsw.fts5query.to_query_string(q: COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE) → str

  Returns the corresponding query in text format

apsw.fts5query.walk(start: COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE) → Iterator[tuple[tuple[COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE, ...], COLUMNFILTER | NEAR | AND | OR | NOT | PHRASE]]

  Yields the parents and each node for a query recursively

  The query tree is traversed top down. Use it like this:

      for parents, node in walk(query):
         # parents will be a tuple of parent nodes
         # node will be current node
         if isinstance(node, PHRASE):
             print(node.phrase)

## FTS5 Auxiliary functions module

`apsw.fts5aux` Implementation of FTS5 auxiliary functions in Python.

Auxiliary functions are used for ranking results, and for processing search results.

apsw.fts5aux.bm25(api: FTS5ExtensionApi, *args: SQLiteValue) → float

  Perform the BM25 calculation for a matching row

  It accepts weights for each column (default 1) which means how much a hit in that column counts for.

  The builtin function is described here. This is a translation of the SQLite C version into Python for illustrative purposes.

apsw.fts5aux.inverse_document_frequency(api: FTS5ExtensionApi) → list[float]

  Measures how rare each search phrase is in the content

  This helper method is intended for use in your own ranking functions. The result is the idf for each phrase in the query.

  A phrase occurring in almost every row will have a value close to zero, while less frequent phrases have increasingly large positive numbers.

  The values will always be at least 0.000001 so you don’t have to worry about negative numbers or division by zero, even for phrases that are not found.

apsw.fts5aux.position_rank(api: FTS5ExtensionApi, *args: SQLiteValue)

  Ranking function boosting the earlier in a column phrases are located

  `bm25()` doesn’t take into where phrases occur. It makes no difference if a phrase occurs at the beginning, middle, or end. This boost takes into account how early the phrase match is, suitable for content with more significant text towards the beginning.

  If the query has phrases and operators (AND, OR, NOT) then those operators are not visible to this function, and only the location of each phrase is taken into consideration. See `apsw.fts5.QueryInfo.phrases`.

  It accepts parameters giving the weights for each column (default 1).

apsw.fts5aux.subsequence(api: FTS5ExtensionApi, *args: SQLiteValue)

  Ranking function boosting rows where tokens are in order

  `bm25()` doesn’t take into account ordering. Phrase matches like `"big truck"` must occur exactly together in that order. Matches for `big truck` scores the same providing both words exist anywhere. This function boosts matches where the order does match so `big red truck` gets a boost while `truck, big` does not for the same query.

  If the query has phrases and operators (AND, OR, NOT) then those operators are not visible to this function, and it looks for ordering of each phrase. For example `big OR truck NOT red` will result in this function boosting `big ... truck ... red` in that order. See `apsw.fts5.QueryInfo.phrases`.

  It accepts parameters giving the weights for each column (default 1).

## FTS5Tokenizer class

class apsw.FTS5Tokenizer

  Wraps a registered tokenizer. Returned by `Connection.fts5_tokenizer()`.

FTS5Tokenizer.__call__(utf8: Buffer, flags: int, locale: str | None, *, include_offsets: bool = True, include_colocated: bool = True) → TokenizerResult

  Does a tokenization, returning a list of the results. If you have no interest in token offsets or colocated tokens then they can be omitted from the results.

  Parameters:

    - utf8 – Input buffer

    - reason – `Reason` flag

    - include_offsets – Returned list includes offsets into utf8 for each token

    - include_colocated – Returned list can include colocated tokens

  ### Example outputs

  Tokenizing `b"first place"` where `1st` has been provided as a colocated token for `first`.

  (Default) include_offsets True, include_colocated True

  >     [
  >       (0, 5, "first", "1st"),
  >       (6, 11, "place"),
  >     ]

  include_offsets False, include_colocated True

  >     [
  >       ("first", "1st"),
  >       ("place", ),
  >     ]

  include_offsets True, include_colocated False

  >     [
  >       (0, 5, "first"),
  >       (6, 11, "place"),
  >     ]

  include_offsets False, include_colocated False

  >     [
  >       "first",
  >       "place",
  >     ]

FTS5Tokenizer.args: tuple[str]

  The arguments the tokenizer was created with.

FTS5Tokenizer.connection: Connection

  The `Connection` this tokenizer is registered with.

FTS5Tokenizer.name: str

  Tokenizer name

## FTS5ExtensionApi class

class apsw.FTS5ExtensionApi

Auxiliary functions run in the context of a FTS5 search, and can be used for ranking, highlighting, and similar operations. Auxiliary functions are registered via `Connection.register_fts5_function()`. This wraps the auxiliary functions API passed as the first parameter to auxiliary functions.

See the example.

FTS5ExtensionApi.aux_data: Any

  You can store an object as auxiliary data which is available across matching rows. It starts out as `None`.

  An example use is to do up front calculations once, rather than on every matched row, such as `fts5aux.inverse_document_frequency()`.

FTS5ExtensionApi.column_count: int

  Returns the number of columns in the table

FTS5ExtensionApi.column_locale(column: int) → str | None

  Retrieves the locale for a column on this row.

FTS5ExtensionApi.column_size(col: int = -1) → int

  Returns the total number of tokens in the current row for a specific column, or if `col` is negative then for all columns.

FTS5ExtensionApi.column_text(col: int) → bytes

  Returns the utf8 bytes for the column of the current row.

FTS5ExtensionApi.column_total_size(col: int = -1) → int

  Returns the total number of tokens in the table for a specific column, or if `col` is negative then for all columns.

FTS5ExtensionApi.inst_count: int

  Returns the number of hits in the current row

FTS5ExtensionApi.inst_tokens(inst: int) → tuple[str, ...] | None

  Access tokens of hit inst in current row. None is returned if the call is not supported.

FTS5ExtensionApi.phrase_column_offsets(phrase: int, column: int) → list[int]

  Returns token offsets the phrase number occurs in in the specified column.

FTS5ExtensionApi.phrase_columns(phrase: int) → tuple[int]

  Returns which columns the phrase number occurs in

FTS5ExtensionApi.phrase_count: int

  Returns the number of phrases in the query

FTS5ExtensionApi.phrase_locations(phrase: int) → list[list[int]]

  Returns which columns and token offsets the phrase number occurs in.

  The returned list is the same length as the number of columns. Each member is a list of token offsets in that column, and will be empty if the phrase is not in that column.

FTS5ExtensionApi.phrases: tuple[tuple[str | None, ...], ...]

  A tuple where each member is a phrase from the query. Each phrase is a tuple of str (or None when not available) per token of the phrase.

  This combines the results of xPhraseCount, xPhraseSize and xQueryToken

FTS5ExtensionApi.query_phrase(phrase: int, callback: FTS5QueryPhrase, closure: Any) → None

  Searches the table for the numbered query. The callback takes two parameters - a different `apsw.FTS5ExtensionApi` and closure.

  An example usage for this method is to see how often the phrases occur in the table. Setup a tracking counter here, and then in the callback you can update it on each visited row. This is shown in the example.

FTS5ExtensionApi.row_count: int

  Returns the number of rows in the table

FTS5ExtensionApi.rowid: int

  Rowid of the current row

FTS5ExtensionApi.tokenize(utf8: Buffer, locale: str | None, *, include_offsets: bool = True, include_colocated: bool = True) → list

  Tokenizes the utf8. FTS5 sets the reason to `FTS5_TOKENIZE_AUX`. See `apsw.FTS5Tokenizer.__call__()` for details.