Question

I’m trying to validate that the fields given to sphinx are valid, but I’m having difficulty.

Imagine that valid fields are cat, mouse, dog, puppy.

Valid searches would then be:

• @cat search terms
• @(cat) search terms
• @(cat, dog) search term
• @cat searchterm1 @dog searchterm2
• @(cat, dog) searchterm1 @mouse searchterm2

So, I want to use a regular expression to find terms such as cat, dog, mouse in the above examples, and check them against a list of valid terms.

Thus, a query such as:
@(goat)

Would produce an error because goat is not a valid term.

I’ve gotten so that I can find simple queries such as @cat with this regex: (?:@)([^( ]*)

But I can’t figure out how to find the rest.

I’m using python & django, for what that’s worth.

Answer 1

I ended up doing this a different way, since none of the above worked. First I found the fields like @cat, with this:

attributes = re.findall('(?:@)([^\( ]*)', query)

Next, I found the more complicated ones, with this:

regex0 = re.compile('''
    @               # at sign
    (?:             # start non-capturing group
        \w+             # non-whitespace, one or more
        \b              # a boundary character (i.e. no more \w)
        |               # OR
        (               # capturing group
            \(              # left paren
            [^@(),]+        # not an @(),
            (?:                 # another non-caputing group
                , *             # a comma, then some spaces
                [^@(),]+        # not @(),
            )*              # some quantity of this non-capturing group
            \)              # a right paren
        )               # end of non-capuring group
    )           # end of non-capturing group
    ''', re.VERBOSE)

# and this puts them into the attributes list.
groupedAttributes = re.findall(regex0, query)
for item in groupedAttributes:
    attributes.extend(item.strip("(").strip(")").split(", "))

Next, I checked if the attributes I found were valid, and added them (uniquely to an array):

# check if the values are valid.
validRegex = re.compile(r'^mice$|^mouse$|^cat$|^dog$')

# if they aren't add them to a new list.
badAttrs = []
for attribute in attributes:
    if len(attribute) == 0:
        # if it's a zero length attribute, we punt
        continue
    if validRegex.search(attribute.lower()) == None:
        # if the attribute from the search isn't in the valid list
        if attribute not in badAttrs:
            # and the attribute isn't already in the list
            badAttrs.append(attribute)

Thanks all for the help though. I’m very glad to have had it!