Miscellaneous tools

indextool

indextool is a helper tool used to dump miscellaneous information about a physical index. The general usage is:

indextool <command> [options]

Options effective for all commands:

• --config <file> (-c <file> for short) overrides the built-in config file names.
• --quiet (-q for short) keep indextool quiet - it will not output banner, etc.
• --help (-h for short) lists all of the parameters that can be called in your particular build of indextool.
• -v show version information of your particular build of indextool.

The commands are as follows:

• --checkconfig just loads and verifies the config file to check if it’s valid, without syntax errors.
• --buildidf DICTFILE1 [DICTFILE2 ...] --out IDFILE build IDF file from one or several dictionary dumps. Additional parameter -skip-uniq will skip unique (df=1) words.
• --build-infixes INDEXNAME build infixes for an existing dict=keywords index (upgrades .sph, .spi in place). You can use this option for legacy index files that already use dict=keywords, but now need to support infix searching too; updating the index files with indextool may prove easier or faster than regenerating them from scratch with indexer.
• --dumpheader FILENAME.sph quickly dumps the provided index header file without touching any other index files or even the configuration file. The report provides a breakdown of all the index settings, in particular the entire attribute and field list.
• --dumpconfig FILENAME.sph dumps the index definition from the given index header file in (almost) compliant sphinx.conf file format.
• --dumpheader INDEXNAME dumps index header by index name with looking up the header path in the configuration file.
• --dumpdict INDEXNAME dumps dictionary. Additional -stats switch will dump to dictionary the total number of documents. It is required for dictionary files that are used for creation of IDF files.
• --dumpdocids INDEXNAME dumps document IDs by index name.
• --dumphitlist INDEXNAME KEYWORD dumps all the hits (occurrences) of a given keyword in a given index, with keyword specified as text.
• --dumphitlist INDEXNAME --wordid ID dumps all the hits (occurrences) of a given keyword in a given index, with keyword specified as internal numeric ID.
• --fold INDEXNAME OPTFILE This options is useful too see how actually tokenizer proceeds input. You can feed indextool with text from file if specified or from stdin otherwise. The output will contain spaces instead of separators (accordingly to your charset_table settings) and lowercased letters in words.
• --htmlstrip INDEXNAME filters stdin using HTML stripper settings for a given index, and prints the filtering results to stdout. Note that the settings will be taken from sphinx.conf, and not the index header.
• --mergeidf NODE1.idf [NODE2.idf ...] --out GLOBAL.idf merge several .idf files into a single one. Additional parameter -skip-uniq will skip unique (df=1) words.
• --morph INDEXNAME applies morphology to the given stdin and prints the result to stdout.
• --check INDEXNAME checks the index data files for consistency errors that might be introduced either by bugs in indexer and/or hardware faults. --check also works on RT indexes, RAM and disk chunks.
• --check-disk-chunk CHUNK_NAME checks only specific disk chunk of RT index. Argument is the numeric extension of disk chunk of RT index.
• --strip-path strips the path names from all the file names referenced from the index (stopwords, wordforms, exceptions, etc). This is useful for checking indexes built on another machine with possibly different path layouts.
• --rotate works only with --check and defines whether to check index waiting for rotation, i.e. with .new extension. This is useful when you want to check your index before actually using it.
• --apply-killlists loads and applies kill-lists for all indexes listed in the config file. Changes are saved in .SPM files. Kill-list files (.SPK) are deleted. This can be useful if you want to move applying indexes from server startup to indexing stage.

spelldump

spelldump is used to extract contents of a dictionary file that uses ispell or MySpell format, which can help build word lists for wordforms - all of the possible forms are pre-built for you.

The general usage is:

spelldump [options] <dictionary> <affix> [result] [locale-name]

The two main parameters are the dictionary’s main file and its affix file; usually these are named as [language-prefix].dict and [language-prefix].aff and will be available with most common Linux distributions, as well as various places online.

[result] specifies where the dictionary data should be output to, and [locale-name] additionally specifies the locale details you wish to use.

There is an additional option, -c [file], which specifies a file for case conversion details.

Examples of its usage are:

spelldump en.dict en.aff
spelldump ru.dict ru.aff ru.txt ru_RU.CP1251
spelldump ru.dict ru.aff ru.txt .1251

The results file will contain a list of all the words in the dictionary in alphabetical order, output in the format of a wordforms file, which you can use to customize for your specific circumstances. An example of the result file:

zone > zone
zoned > zoned
zoning > zoning

wordbreaker

wordbreaker is used to split compound words, as usual in URLs, into its component words. For example, this tool can split “lordoftherings” into its four component words, or http://manofsteel.warnerbros.com into “man of steel warner bros”. This helps searching, without requiring prefixes or infixes: searching for “sphinx” wouldn’t match “sphinxsearch” but if you break the compound word and index the separate components, you’ll get a match without the costs of prefix and infix larger index files.

Examples of its usage are:

echo manofsteel | bin/wordbreaker -dict dict.txt split
man of steel

The input stream will be separated in words using the -dict dictionary file. In no dictionary specified, wordbreaker looks in the working folder for a wordbreaker-dict.txt file. (The dictionary should match the language of the compound word.) The split command breaks words from the standard input, and outputs the result in the standard output. There are also test and bench commands that let you test the splitting quality and benchmark the splitting functionality.

Wordbreaker needs a dictionary to recognize individual substrings within a string. To differentiate between different guesses, it uses the relative frequency of each word in the dictionary: higher frequency means higher split probability. You can generate such a file using the indexer tool:

indexer --buildstops dict.txt 100000 --buildfreqs myindex -c /path/to/sphinx.conf

which will write the 100,000 most frequent words, along with their counts, from myindex into dict.txt. The output file is a text file, so you can edit it by hand, if need be, to add or remove words.