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We have used Thinking-Sphinx in several projects to implement search engines. Thinking-Sphinx is a wrapper in Ruby to use ActiveRecord with Sphinx. But in the project I’m working right now I had to solve a different problem: the user should be able to search for formatted values, however without using the formatting characters, i.e, suppose a field containing 111.444.777-35, the user should be able to find it searching for 11144477735 (or a substring of it).

The default behaviour for Thinking-Sphinx is to index the exact values for each column it scans, but we can by-pass it. The Thinking-Sphinx index definition allows us to use raw SQL to define which values should be indexed for each attribute. In my case, I used the native PostgreSQL regular expressions functions to get rid of the punctuation characters, indexing only the “clean” version of each value. My database column is called “entity_number”:

define_index

Tags: Rails, Ruby, sphinx, thinking-sphinx
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Ruby 1.9 has some cool new features. One of them is the ability to define default values for the arguments passed to code blocks, like in the following example:

pow = proc { |a, b = 2| a**b }
 
pow.call 3, 3
# 27
 
pow.call 3
# 9

This is very useful, for instance, when we dynamically create new methods using metaprogramming and want some of the arguments for these methods to be optional.

class MyMath
  class < < self
    define_method :pow do |base, exponent = 2|
      base**exponent
    end
  end
end
 
MyMath.pow 3 # 9
MyMath.pow 2, 3 # 8

But in Ruby 1.8.x we can’t do that, we can’t define default values the arguments of a code block. So what if your application runs on 1.8.x and you need to dynamically create methods with optional arguments? There is a solution, not so elegant as the

Tags: Ruby
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