pgsql: Fix default text search parser's ts_headline code for phrase que - Mailing list pgsql-committers

From Tom Lane
Subject pgsql: Fix default text search parser's ts_headline code for phrase que
Date
Msg-id E1jMaq8-0000bO-Sd@gemulon.postgresql.org
Whole thread Raw
List pgsql-committers
Fix default text search parser's ts_headline code for phrase queries.

This code could produce very poor results when asked to highlight a
string based on a query using phrase-match operators.  The root cause
is that hlCover(), which is supposed to find a minimal substring that
matches the query, was written assuming that word position is not
significant.  I'm only 95% convinced that its algorithm was correct even
for plain AND/OR queries; but it definitely fails completely for phrase
matches, causing it to possibly not identify a cover string at all.

Hence, rewrite hlCover() with a less-tense algorithm that just tries
all the possible substrings, earlier and shorter ones first.  (This is
not as bad as it sounds performance-wise, because all of the string
matching has been done already: the repeated tsquery match checks
boil down to pointer comparisons.)

Unfortunately, since that approach produces more candidate cover
strings than before, it also exposes that there were bugs in the
heuristics in mark_hl_words() for selecting a best cover string.
Fixes there include:
* Do not apply the ShortWord filter to words that appear in the query.
* Remove a misguided optimization for quickly rejecting a cover.
* Fix order-of-operation bug that could cause computation of a
wrong figure of merit (poslen) when shortening a cover.
* Change the preference rule so that candidate headlines that do not
include their whole cover string (after MaxWords trimming) are lowest
priority, since they may not actually satisfy the user's query.

This results in some changes in existing regression test cases,
but they all seem reasonable.  Note in particular that the tests
involving strings like "1 2 3" were previously being affected by
the ShortWord filter, masking the normal matching behavior.

Per bug #16345 from Augustinas Jokubauskas; the new test cases are
based on that example.  Back-patch to 9.6 where phrase search was
added to tsquery.

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16345-2e0cf5cddbdcd3b4@postgresql.org

Branch
------
master

Details
-------
https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/c9b0c678d30aa3f6bbf996ea15af8acbfcfb2ac8

Modified Files
--------------
src/backend/tsearch/wparser_def.c     | 173 +++++++++++++++++++---------------
src/test/regress/expected/tsearch.out |  43 ++++++---
src/test/regress/sql/tsearch.sql      |  11 +++
3 files changed, 141 insertions(+), 86 deletions(-)


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