[Koha-devel] spell suggestion in rel_3_0 (for kados 1st)

[Paul POULAIN]

Hi world,

in opac-search.pl, rel_3_0, there is a spelling suggestion when the 
search don't return any answer.
It is based on some hardcoded database :
              DBI->connect( "DBI:mysql:suggest:66.213.78.76",
                "auth", "Free2cirC" );

I tried to activate it, but get a :
> [Fri Dec 15 16:33:55 2006] [error] [client 193.251.63.39] DBI 
> connect('suggest:66.213.78.76','auth',...) failed: Host 
> 'paulpoulain.pck.nerim.net' is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server at 
> /home/paul/koha.dev/rel_3_0/opac/opac-search.pl line 578, referer: 
> http://o18.bureau.paulpoulain.com/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl

which is not a surprise to me ;-)

then I took my mining light, and entered the caves...

I found : make_spellcheck_suggest.pl, in misc directory.

This script seems to have some problems :
- it relies on marc_subfield_table & marc_word, that don't exist anymore
- something is missing at line 97 : %tables variable is missing some 
tables descriptions (& a "; at the end...)
- it works with soundex algorythm, that is very poor in french (it 
doesn't take care of accents & other french-specific things)

opac-search.pl itself seems to have problems too :
- $koha_spsuggest_insert is never called : is it a feature you have 
abandonned ?

I was wondering :
- if there is a more uptodate script that you forgot to commit, because 
this one can't work (I can't find the script in dev_week) ?
- if we could use a specific soundex, depending on the language : there 
are some well working soundex_like algorythm for french & I bet other 
languages have their. That would require removing the 
str_cmp(soundex(suggestion),soundex(?)) from opac-search
- if we could use Aspell for spellchecking. I tried to investigate this 
option, it works very very well with common names, and we mostly want it 
to work for proper names like authors, so I think it's not something to 
investigate too deeply.
- who will be the next french president, in 2007, May ?

ooooops... you probably don't have the answer to the last question, but 
the other one yes ;-)
--
Paul POULAIN et Henri Damien LAURENT
Consultants indépendants
en logiciels libres et bibliothéconomie (http://www.koha-fr.org)
Tel : 04 91 31 45 19