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Ignoring HTML Tags in Typesense Document Search

TLDR Shouvik inquired about avoiding HTML tags in Typesense searches. Kishore Nallan and Ricardo suggested storing HTML in non-searchable fields. Kishore Nallan proposed adding an HTML-skip flag at indexing, to which Shouvik agreed, and initiated an issue tracking on Github.

31mo

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May 01, 2021 (31 months ago)

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Shouvik

02:05 PM

Hello :) I was wondering does typesense have a way to ignore strings in a document ? We store HTML data and would like to ignore those HTML tags as well as any HTML attributes when performing search. Eg. If I search for ‘mark’ then I shouldn’t get hits for ‘<mark>...’

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Kishore Nallan

02:06 PM

Is there a reason you can't remove those HTML tags before indexing the test.

Shouvik

02:12 PM

So we store HTML in our db and then render that HTML directly in the frontend. It’s not pretty but it’s extremely hard to change right now. Because of this I’m afraid it would be difficult to use the highlight tags feature you have with typesense to show the user where the query matches if we were to return non HTML hits. Basically it would be hard to render from the hits if the HTML didn’t exist

02:13

Shouvik

02:13 PM

Maybe if there’s a way to store HTML in a non searchable field and then store the text in a searchable field that would solve this ? But it would double each document size

05:45

Shouvik

05:45 PM

so my question is is there a way to customize the indexing to strip the HTML tags before the doc is indexed

May 02, 2021 (31 months ago)

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Ricardo

06:16 AM

"Maybe if there’s a way to store HTML in a non searchable field and then store the text in a searchable field"

https://typesense.org/docs/0.20.0/api/collections.html#with-pre-defined-schema
"Your documents can contain other fields not mentioned in the collection's schema - they will be stored on disk but not indexed in memory."

That said your query_by will define what gets searched on.

Kishore Nallan

09:53 AM

Shouvik Would it help if we added a flag to skip html tags at indexing, but still return the tags in the response?

Shouvik

01:29 PM

Kishore Nallan yes that would be the perfect solution for us! I believe if this is the case then the highlight tags would also be in the correct offset positions of the original HTML. Is this difficult to implement this flag ?

01:30

Shouvik

01:30 PM

Ricardo thanks yes that’s exactly what I meant to refer to

Kishore Nallan

01:47 PM

Cool, that should be possible to do it once we figure out what kind of library we need for the HTML parsing. Can you please create an issue on Github so that we can track and so that others can also discover / chime-in?

Shouvik

01:49 PM

Will do and I’ll post it here when created

02:03

Shouvik

02:03 PM

https://github.com/typesense/typesense/issues/265

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