"""Suggest a spelling for a search word that found nothing. WHY NOT SOUNDEX. MySQL has it; SQLite does not, and the suite runs on SQLite while production runs MySQL - so a SOUNDEX() in a query is either an error in every test or a production path no test ever executes. It is also wrong for this data: soundex is English-name phonetics, four characters wide, and it DISCARDS DIGITS, so CSF16 and CSF17 hash identically. Half of what people search here is an identifier. So this is character-based, runs in Python, and behaves the same on both dialects. THE VOCABULARY IS THE DATA. No dictionary knows Genspect, Telesis, Keyence or wax-trace. The terms come from the columns being searched, which also means the corpus is never stale: a vendor added this morning is correctable this morning. IT SUGGESTS, IT DOES NOT REWRITE. The caller offers "did you mean" on a search that found nothing. Silently searching for something else is how somebody orders the wrong cartridge. """ from collections import defaultdict # Longest edit distance allowed, by length of the word being corrected. A short # word has few ways to be wrong, so one edit is already a different word: 'bay' # to 'bar' is not a typo anybody wants guessed for them. _DISTANCE_BY_LENGTH = ((4, 1), (8, 2)) _MAX_DISTANCE = 3 # Below this a word is too short to correct at all. MIN_LENGTH = 3 # Candidates sharing no trigram with the query are not scored. Cuts the work # from the whole vocabulary to a handful without changing the answer, because a # word within the distances above always shares at least one trigram. _TRIGRAM = 3 def _digits(word): return ''.join(c for c in word if c.isdigit()) def max_distance(word): for length, allowed in _DISTANCE_BY_LENGTH: if len(word) <= length: return allowed return _MAX_DISTANCE def damerau_levenshtein(first, second, cutoff=None): """Edit distance counting a transposition as ONE edit, not two. Transposition is the commonest typing error - 'Keyecne' for 'Keyence' - and plain Levenshtein charges two for it, which pushes real typos past the threshold on short words. `cutoff` abandons a comparison that cannot come in under it. Most candidates are hopeless and this is the difference between scoring a vocabulary and scanning one. """ if first == second: return 0 if abs(len(first) - len(second)) > (cutoff if cutoff is not None else 99): return (cutoff or 99) + 1 previous = list(range(len(second) + 1)) beforelast = None for i, a in enumerate(first, 1): current = [i] + [0] * len(second) for j, b in enumerate(second, 1): cost = 0 if a == b else 1 current[j] = min(previous[j] + 1, # deletion current[j - 1] + 1, # insertion previous[j - 1] + cost) # substitution if (beforelast is not None and i > 1 and j > 1 and a == second[j - 2] and first[i - 2] == b): current[j] = min(current[j], beforelast[j - 2] + cost) if cutoff is not None and min(current) > cutoff: return cutoff + 1 beforelast, previous = previous, current return previous[-1] def _trigrams(word): padded = ' %s ' % word return {padded[i:i + _TRIGRAM] for i in range(len(padded) - _TRIGRAM + 1)} class Vocabulary: """Words harvested from searchable data, indexed for near-match lookup.""" def __init__(self, terms=()): self.words = set() self._bytrigram = defaultdict(set) for term in terms: self.add(term) def add(self, term): for word in str(term or '').split(): word = word.strip().lower() if len(word) < MIN_LENGTH: continue if word in self.words: continue self.words.add(word) for gram in _trigrams(word): self._bytrigram[gram].add(word) def candidates(self, word): found = set() for gram in _trigrams(word): found |= self._bytrigram.get(gram, set()) return found def suggest(self, word): """The best correction for `word`, or None to leave it alone. Returns None rather than a poor guess: a wrong suggestion costs more than no suggestion, because somebody acts on it. """ word = (word or '').strip().lower() if len(word) < MIN_LENGTH or word in self.words: return None limit = max_distance(word) best, bestdistance = None, limit + 1 for candidate in self.candidates(word): if not _acceptable(word, candidate): continue distance = damerau_levenshtein(word, candidate, cutoff=limit) if distance < bestdistance: best, bestdistance = candidate, distance elif distance == bestdistance and best is not None: # A tie means two equally good answers and no way to choose. # Offering either one implies a confidence that is not there. best = None return best if bestdistance <= limit else None def suggest_query(self, query): """Correct a whole query, or None if nothing in it can be improved.""" words = [w for w in (query or '').split() if w] if not words: return None fixed, changed = [], False for word in words: suggestion = self.suggest(word) if suggestion and suggestion != word.lower(): fixed.append(suggestion) changed = True else: fixed.append(word) return ' '.join(fixed) if changed else None def _acceptable(word, candidate): """Guards that keep a correction from destroying an identifier. DIGITS MUST MATCH EXACTLY. CSF16 to CSF17 is one edit and a catastrophe: it is a different bay, a different machine, a different cartridge. Any term carrying digits is treated as an identifier, and an identifier is either right or not correctable. THE FIRST CHARACTER MUST MATCH. Typing errors land in the middle and at the end far more often than on the first key, so requiring it costs almost no recall and removes most of the nonsense. """ if _digits(word) != _digits(candidate): return False return bool(word) and bool(candidate) and word[0] == candidate[0]