Did you mean functionality with Laravel Scout

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In this tutorial, we'll show you how to create "Did you mean" functionality fast and easy. Data we'll use will be a large city database consisting of more than 3 million cities. The idea is to show the correct city name in case your users misspell them. The list of cities comes from MaxMind, Inc and you can find the list here. To understand what we are building take a look at the demo page. Setting up Laravel isn't covered, but you can find plenty of tutorials on how to do this. Our project will depend on Laravel Scout and TNTSearch so lets install those dependencies:

composer require teamtnt/laravel-scout-tntsearch-driver

Add this to your providers array in config\app.php

'providers' => [ /* * Package Service Providers... */ Laravel\Scout\ScoutServiceProvider::class, TeamTNT\Scout\TNTSearchScoutServiceProvider::class, ]

After that publish the Scout config file like:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Laravel\Scout\ScoutServiceProvider"

And in your `.env, set TNTSearch as the default driver:

SCOUT_DRIVER=tntsearch

In config/scout.php set the storage_path

'tntsearch' => [ 'storage' => storage_path(), ],

Make sure this directory is writable. Lets start with a basic command that will download and import the list of cities to our database. The database migration and the model look as follows:

php artisan make:model City --migration

<?php use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema; use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint; use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration; class CreateCitiesTable extends Migration { /** * Run the migrations. * * @return void */ public function up() { Schema::create('cities', function (Blueprint $table) { $table->increments('id'); $table->string('country'); $table->string('city'); $table->string('region'); $table->float('population'); $table->double('latitude', 15, 8); $table->double('longitude', 15, 8); }); } /** * Reverse the migrations. * * @return void */ public function down() { Schema::dropIfExists('cities'); } }

Add public $timestamps = false; to your City model since we don't need timestamps. Notice the column n_grams , this will help us later to achieve the did you mean functionality. Now, lets populate the table. Our dataset is a regular file where each line represents a city. A simple command will do the job:

php artisan make:command ImportCities

<?php namespace App\Console\Commands; use App\City; use Illuminate\Console\Command; use TeamTNT\TNTSearch\Indexer\TNTIndexer; class ImportCities extends Command { /** * The name and signature of the console command. * * @var string */ protected $signature = 'import:cities'; /** * The console command description. * * @var string */ protected $description = 'Imports cities from MaxMind'; /** * Create a new command instance. * * @return void */ public function __construct() { $this->tnt = new TNTIndexer; parent::__construct(); } /** * Execute the console command. * * @return mixed */ public function handle() { $this->info("Downloading worldcitiespop.txt.gz from MaxMind"); $gzipedFile = storage_path().'/worldcitiespop.txt.gz'; $unZipedFile = storage_path().'/worldcitiespop.txt'; if (!file_exists($gzipedFile)) { file_put_contents($gzipedFile, fopen("http://download.maxmind.com/download/worldcities/worldcitiespop.txt.gz", 'r')); } $this->info("Unziping worldcitiespop.txt.gz to worldcitiespop.txt"); $this->line("



Inserting cities to database"); if (!file_exists($unZipedFile)) { $this->unzipFile($gzipedFile); } $cities = fopen(storage_path().'/worldcitiespop.txt', "r"); $lineNumber = 0; $bar = $this->output->createProgressBar(3173959); if ($cities) { while (!feof($cities)) { $line = fgets($cities, 4096); if ($lineNumber == 0) { $lineNumber++; continue; } //we skip the first line since it's the header $line = explode(',', $line); $this->insertCity($line); $lineNumber++; $bar->advance(); } fclose($cities); } $bar->finish(); } public function insertCity($cityArray) { //we enter only cities wich have a population set if ($cityArray[4] < 1) { return; } $city = new City; $city->country = $cityArray[0]; $city->city = utf8_encode($cityArray[2]); $city->region = $cityArray[3]; $city->population = $cityArray[4]; $city->latitude = trim($cityArray[5]); $city->longitude = trim($cityArray[6]); $city->n_grams = $this->createNGrams($city->city); $city->save(); } public function unzipFile($from) { // Raising this value may increase performance $buffer_size = 4096; // read 4kb at a time $out_file_name = str_replace('.gz', '', $from); // Open our files (in binary mode) $file = gzopen($from, 'rb'); $out_file = fopen($out_file_name, 'wb'); // Keep repeating until the end of the input file while (!gzeof($file)) { // Read buffer-size bytes // Both fwrite and gzread and binary-safe fwrite($out_file, gzread($file, $buffer_size)); } // Files are done, close files fclose($out_file); gzclose($file); } public function createNGrams($word) { return utf8_encode($this->tnt->buildTrigrams($word)); } }

Don't forget to register the command in app\Console\Kernel.php

<?php protected $commands = [ \App\Console\Commands\ImportCities::class ];

The command will automatically download the file from Maxmind, unzip it and import the cities to our database. We'll only import cities that have a population greater than 0. Once we have the cities in our database, let's create the inverted index that scout will consume.

php artisan tntsearch:import App\City

Ok, now we can do a basic search for a city:

App\City::serach('Berlin')->get()

Although this works fine, it's still not able to fetch a city if you make a typo. Let's take care of this.

php artisan make:command CreateCityTrigrams

<?php namespace App\Console\Commands; use Illuminate\Console\Command; use TeamTNT\TNTSearch\TNTSearch; class CreateCityTrigrams extends Command { /** * The name and signature of the console command. * * @var string */ protected $signature = 'city:trigrams'; /** * The console command description. * * @var string */ protected $description = 'Creates an index of city trigrams'; /** * Create a new command instance. * * @return void */ public function __construct() { parent::__construct(); } /** * Execute the console command. * * @return mixed */ public function handle() { $this->info("Creating index of city trigrams"); $tnt = new TNTSearch; $driver = config('database.default'); $config = config('scout.tntsearch') + config("database.connections.$driver"); $tnt->loadConfig($config); $tnt->setDatabaseHandle(app('db')->connection()->getPdo()); $indexer = $tnt->createIndex('cityngrams.index'); $indexer->query('SELECT id, n_grams FROM cities;'); $indexer->setLanguage('no'); $indexer->run(); } }

This creates the index of trigrams that we'll query if we don't find anything in our cities.index

Our CityController.php looks like:

<?php namespace App\Http\Controllers; use App\City; use App\Http\Controllers\Controller; use Illuminate\Http\Request; use TeamTNT\TNTSearch\Indexer\TNTIndexer; use TeamTNT\TNTSearch\TNTSearch; class CityController extends Controller { public function search(Request $request) { $res = City::search($request->get('city'))->get(); if (isset($res[0]) && $this->isExactMatch($request, $res[0])) { return [ 'didyoumean' => false, 'data' => $res[0] ]; } //if we don't find anything we'll try to guess return [ 'didyoumean' => true, 'data' => $this->getSuggestions($request) ]; } public function isExactMatch($request, $result) { return strtolower($request->get('city')) == strtolower($result->city); } public function getSuggestions(Request $request) { $TNTIndexer = new TNTIndexer; $trigrams = $TNTIndexer->buildTrigrams($request->get('city')); $tnt = new TNTSearch; $driver = config('database.default'); $config = config('scout.tntsearch') + config("database.connections.$driver"); $tnt->loadConfig($config); $tnt->setDatabaseHandle(app('db')->connection()->getPdo()); $tnt->selectIndex("cityngrams.index"); $res = $tnt->search($trigrams, 10); $keys = collect($res['ids'])->values()->all(); $suggestions = City::whereIn('id', $keys)->get(); $suggestions->map(function ($city) use ($request) { $city->distance = levenshtein($request->get('city'), $city->city); }); $sorted = $suggestions->sort(function ($a, $b) { if ($a->distance === $b->distance) { if ($a->population === $b->population) { return 0; } return $a->population > $b->population ? -1 : 1; } return $a->distance < $b->distance ? -1 : 1; }); return $sorted->values()->all(); } }

How does it work

We threw a lot of code at you above. Although this will work perfectly it's also important that you understand why it's working and what the logic behind is. Lets, for example, take the city "Berlin". Now, if we break it into trigrams we become the following:

__b _be ber erl rli lin in_ n__

Let's assume you make a typo and instead of Berlin you type "Berln". The trigrams now look like:

__b _be ber erl rln ln_ n__

As you can see, 5 trigrams match the trigrams from the correct form and only 2 don't match.

Each trigram set of the correct form is stored in cityngrams.index . If we query the index with a mistyped word "berln" well get pretty accurate results since 5 matches were found. It will also return some other results that match the trigrams so we'll have to do one more step to get the best suggestions possible. The levenshtein distance between two words will simply tell us how many characters we need to change to get the same word. So the levenshtein distance between "Berlin" and "Berln" is 1 because we only need to add an "i" for the words to match. So we'll sort our result from our cityngrams.index by levensthein distance and return the suggestions to the user. Pretty simple but powerfull, isn't it?

The front end of the demo page is build with react. If you're lazy to write the code, you can download it from github. In the upcoming months will create an on-line course on how to get started with React and Laravel so make sure to subscribe to our newsletter below. Also, follow us on twitter @nticaric and @sasatokic

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