Python Specific Notes

The Python3 bindings for Xapian are packaged in the xapian module, so to use them you need to add this to your code:

import xapian

They require Python >= 3.2 in Xapian 1.4.x.

The Python API largely follows the C++ API - the differences and additions are noted below.

Strings

The Xapian C++ API is largely agnostic about character encoding, and uses the std::string type as an opaque container for a sequence of bytes. In places where the bytes represent text (for example, in the Stem, QueryParser and TermGenerator classes), UTF-8 encoding is used. In order to wrap this for Python, std::string is mapped to/from the Python bytes type.

As a convenience, you can also pass Python str objects as parameters where this is appropriate, which will be converted to UTF-8 encoded text. Where std::string is returned, it’s always mapped to bytes in Python, which you can convert to a Python str by calling .decode(‘utf-8’) on it like so:

for i in doc.termlist():
  print(i.term.decode('utf-8'))

Unicode

The xapian Python bindings accept unicode strings as well as simple strings (ie, “str” type strings) at all places in the API which accept string data. Any unicode strings supplied will automatically be translated into UTF-8 simple strings before being passed to the Xapian core. The Xapian core is largely agnostic about character encoding, but in those places where it does process data in a character encoding dependent way it assumes that the data is in UTF-8. The Xapian Python bindings always return string data as simple strings.

Therefore, in order to avoid issues with character encodings, you should always pass text data to Xapian as unicode strings, or UTF-8 encoded simple strings. There is, however, no requirement for simple strings passed into Xapian to be valid UTF-8 encoded strings, unless they are being passed to a text processing routine (such as the query parser, or the stemming algorithms). For example, it is perfectly valid to pass arbitrary binary data in a simple string to the xapian.Document.set_data() method.

It is often useful to normalise unicode data before passing it to Xapian - Xapian currently has no built-in support for normalising unicode representations of data. The standard python module “unicodedata” provides support for normalising unicode: you probably want the “NFKC” normalisation scheme: in other words, use something like

unicodedata.normalize('NFKC', u'foo')

to normalise the string “foo” before passing it to Xapian.

Exceptions

Xapian-specific exceptions are subclasses of the xapian.Error class, so you can trap all Xapian-specific exceptions like so:

try:
    do_something_with_xapian()
except xapian.Error as e:
    print str(e)

xapian.Error is itself a subclass of the standard Python exceptions.Exception class.

Iterators

The iterator classes in the Xapian C++ API are wrapped in a pythonic style. The following are supported (where marked as “default iterator”, it means __iter__() does the right thing so you can for instance use for term in document to iterate over terms in a Document object):

Class Python Method Equivalent C++ Method Python iterator type
MSet default iterator begin() MSetIter
ESet default iterator begin() ESetIter
Enquire matching_terms() get_matching_terms_begin() TermIter
Query default iterator get_terms_begin() TermIter
Database allterms() (also as default iterator) allterms_begin() TermIter
Database postlist(tname) postlist_begin(tname) PostingIter
Database termlist(docid) termlist_begin(docid) TermIter
Database positionlist(docid, tname) positionlist_begin(docid, tname) PositionIter
Database metadata_keys(prefix) metadata_keys(prefix) TermIter
Database spellings() spellings_begin(term) TermIter
Database synonyms(term) synonyms_begin(term) TermIter
Database synonym_keys(prefix) synonym_keys_begin(prefix) TermIter
Document values() values_begin() ValueIter
Document termlist() (also as default iterator) termlist_begin() TermIter
QueryParser stoplist() stoplist_begin() TermIter
QueryParser unstemlist(tname) unstem_begin(tname) TermIter
ValueCountMatchSpy values() values_begin() TermIter
ValueCountMatchSpy top_values() top_values_begin() TermIter

The pythonic iterators generally return Python objects, with properties available as attribute values, with lazy evaluation where appropriate. An exception is the PositionIter object returned by Database.positionlist, which returns an integer.

The lazy evaluation is mainly transparent, but does become visible in one situation: if you keep an object returned by an iterator, without evaluating its properties to force the lazy evaluation to happen, and then move the iterator forward, the object may no longer be able to efficiently perform the lazy evaluation. In this situation, an exception will be raised indicating that the information requested wasn’t available. This will only happen for a few of the properties - most are either not evaluated lazily (because the underlying Xapian implementation doesn’t evaluate them lazily, so there’s no advantage in lazy evaluation), or can be accessed even after the iterator has moved. The simplest work around is simply to evaluate any properties you wish to use which are affected by this before moving the iterator. The complete set of iterator properties affected by this is:

  • Database.allterms (also accessible as Database.__iter__): termfreq
  • Database.termlist: termfreq and positer
  • Document.termlist (also accessible as Document.__iter__): termfreq and positer
  • Database.postlist: positer

MSet

MSet objects have some additional methods to simplify access (these work using the C++ array dereferencing):

Method name Explanation
get_hit(index) returns MSetItem at index
get_document_percentage(index) convert_to_percent(get_hit(index))
get_document(index) get_hit(index).get_document()
get_docid(index) get_hit(index).get_docid()

Additionally, the MSet has a property, mset.items, which returns a list of tuples representing the MSet. This is now deprecated - please use the property API instead (it works in Xapian 1.0.x too). The tuple members and the equivalent property names are as follows:

Index Property name Contents
xapian.MSET_DID docid Document id
xapian.MSET_WT weight Weight
xapian.MSET_RANK rank Rank
xapian.MSET_PERCENT percent Percentage weight
xapian.MSET_DOCUMENT document Document object (Note: this member of the tuple was never actually set!)

Two MSet objects are equal if they have the same number and maximum possible number of members, and if every document member of the first MSet exists at the same index in the second MSet, with the same weight.

Non-Class Functions

The C++ API contains a few non-class functions (the Database factory functions, and some functions reporting version information), which are wrapped like so for Python 3:

  • Xapian::version_string() is wrapped as xapian.version_string()
  • Xapian::major_version() is wrapped as xapian.major_version()
  • Xapian::minor_version() is wrapped as xapian.minor_version()
  • Xapian::revision() is wrapped as xapian.revision()
  • Xapian::Remote::open() is wrapped as xapian.remote_open() (both the TCP and “program” versions are wrapped - the SWIG wrapper checks the parameter list to decide which to call).
  • Xapian::Remote::open_writable() is wrapped as xapian.remote_open_writable() (both the TCP and “program” versions are wrapped - the SWIG wrapper checks the parameter list to decide which to call).

The version of the bindings in use is available as xapian.__version__ (as recommended by PEP 396). This may not be the same as xapian.version_string() as the latter is the version of xapian-core (the C++ library) in use.

Query

In C++ there’s a Xapian::Query constructor which takes a query operator and start/end iterators specifying a number of terms or queries, plus an optional parameter. In Python, this is wrapped to accept any Python sequence (for example a list or tuple) to give the terms/queries, and you can specify a mixture of terms and queries if you wish. For example:

subq = xapian.Query(xapian.Query.OP_AND, "hello", "world")
q = xapian.Query(xapian.Query.OP_AND, [subq, "foo", xapian.Query("bar", 2)])

MatchAll and MatchNothing

As of 1.1.1, these are wrapped as xapian.Query.MatchAll and xapian.Query.MatchNothing.

MatchDecider

Custom MatchDeciders can be created in Python - subclass xapian.MatchDecider, ensure you call the super-constructor, and define a __call__ method that will do the work. The simplest example (which does nothing useful) would be as follows:

class mymatchdecider(xapian.MatchDecider):
  def __init__(self):
    xapian.MatchDecider.__init__(self)

  def __call__(self, doc):
    # Accept all documents.
    return True

RangeProcessors

The RangeProcessor class (and its subclasses) provide an operator() method in C++ which is exposed in Python as a __call__() method, making the class instances into callables.

This method checks whether a beginning and end of a range are in a format understood by the RangeProcessor, and if so returns a Query object which matches the range (typically it converts the beginning and end into strings which sort appropriately and returns an OP_VALUE_RANGE query). There are several built-in RangeProcessor subclasses, but you can also define custom ones in python.

class MyRP(xapian.RangeProcessor):
    def __init__(self):
        xapian.RangeProcessor.__init__(self)
    def __call__(self, begin, end):
        return xapian.Query(xapian.Query.OP_VALUE_RANGE, "A"+begin, "B"+end)

Apache and mod_python/mod_wsgi

Prior to Xapian 1.3.0, you had to tell mod_python and mod_wsgi to run applications which use Xapian in the main interpreter. Xapian 1.3.0 no longer uses the simplified GIL state API, and so this restriction no longer applies.