Excerpts / Keyword Highlighting

When displaying search results, sometimes you may wish to highlight the query keywords in a record’s text. This can be done using Sphinx’s excerpts feature.

Excerpts can be used in two different ways - you can either add a wrapper pane around each search result which provides access to an excerpts method, or build an Excerpter object yourself.

For the first approach, once you’ve constructed your search, you need to add the pane to ensure each search result gets wrapped appropriately:

@articles = Article.search params[:query]
@articles.context[:panes] << ThinkingSphinx::Panes::ExcerptsPane

And then you can access excerpted text for any method on each search result:

<% @articles.each do |article| %>
  <div>
    <h3><%= article.excerpts.title %></h3>
    <div class="date"><%= article.created_at.to_s(:short) %></div>
    <%= article.excerpts.body %>
  </div>
<% end %>

Instead of wrapping every single search result to add that helper method, you can instead create an Excerpter instance and call out to that. When constructing the excerpter, you will need to use the full index name (which includes the standard _core suffix that Thinking Sphinx appends to the model name).

@articles  = Article.search params[:query]
@excerpter = ThinkingSphinx::Excerpter.new 'article_core',
  params[:query]

And then in your views, call excerpt! for each piece of text you wish to calculate excerpts for:

<% @articles.each do |article| %>
  <div>
    <h3><%= @excerpter.excerpt! article.title %></h3>
    <div class="date"><%= article.created_at.to_s(:short) %></div>
    <%= @excerpter.excerpt! article.body %>
  </div>
<% end %>

If you want to change the default options of excerpts, you can pass them in via the :excerpts option in a search (for the first approach) or as a third argument when building an Excerpter in the second approach.

@articles = Article.search params[:query], :excerpts => {
  :before_match    => '<span class="match">',
  :after_match     => '</span>',
  :chunk_separator => ' &#8230; ' # ellipsis
}
# or
@excerpter = ThinkingSphinx::Excerpter.new 'article_core',
  params[:query], {
    :before_match    => '<span class="match">',
    :after_match     => '</span>',
    :chunk_separator => ' &#8230; ' # ellipsis
  }

The full set of options are covered in the Sphinx documentation