Simple Search Language

The module is a parser for complex search strings.

It allows deriving a structured representation from a serach string that can contain complex operators. It is intended for sitations where a complex query against a text field is inut as a string.

Usage

When imported the module exports a function that allows the caller to supply a list of labels that are supported when parsing. Doing so will return a function that will parse a given query with the supplied search query:

const simpleSearchLanguage = require('simple-search-language');

const processSearch = simpleSearchLanguage({
  labels: ['somelabel', 'otherlabel']
});

The function that is returned can then be called to with a given search term and the output requested in a given format:

const parsedResult = processSearch('foo bar somelabel:baz', { format: 'json' });

Search Language representations

A query in this language has roughly this grammer:

token = list | "-" token | text | Label text
list  = "(" expr ")"
expr  = token | token OR expr | token (AND) expr
Label = (from: | to: | cc: | bcc: | subject:) text
text  = "a-z"+ | '"' [^"]+ '"'

• The (AND) is implicit (but should maybe be explicit?)

License

simple-search-language is licensed under a standard 3-clause BSD license -- see the LICENSE-file for details.