My first post to Stack Overflow so be gentle please! I am about to start a new Ruby on Rails (3.1) project for a client. One of their requirements is that there is a search engine, which will be indexing roughly 2,000 documents which are a mixture of PDF, Word, Excel and HTML.
I had hoped to use either thinking-sphinx or Texticle (most popular at https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/rails_search.html) but as I understand it:
- Texticle requires PostgreSQL. I’m on MySQL.
- thinking-sphinx doesn’t index files on the file system.
- even if I saved my attachments into the database, thinking-sphinx still wouldn’t work as it requires plain text (according to http://groups.google.com/group/thinking-sphinx/browse_thread/thread/69cdc1c8e1c096ff)
So I’m left with two options:
- Pick a different search tool
- Try to extract plain-text versions of the attachments into the database for thinking-sphinx to read
Which approach do you recommend?
If it’s a different search tool, which one? My requirements are pretty basic so I’d really like one that’s very easy to set up and has lots of documentation, examples and tutorials!
If it’s extracting, can you recommend extractors for common file types such as PDF, Word, Excel and HTML?
Thanks everyone. Really appreciate your help.
Just to update this. The approach I’ve decided to go with is:
Try to extract plain-text versions of the attachments into the database for thinking-sphinx to read
Specifically, I’ll be doing the following:
It looks as if it will be as simple as calling
java -jar tika-app-0.10.jar -t [file]but I’ll post my experiences if it turns out to be more complicated!