What is a good Java Library to use for searching through several files for a list of search terms? [closed]

Question

Basically, what I would like to do is search through a folder its subfolders for a list of search terms. It does not have to be highly optimized or anything like that. I would like the library to be able to "Match Case," match "Whole Words Only," etc.

I think I could write something like this, opening each file in a file, and searching each word, etc, but I really want a short-cut. Is there some library that already does most of this?

My dream code would be something like:

ArrayList occurrences = SomeLibrary.parse("directoryPath","searchTerm");

Is there anything close to this high level?

Thanks, Grae

Answer 1

I would not recommend using Lucene (or Solr) for these requirements.

1. First of all, there is no need for full-featured text search library that (to put it simply) does all kinds of magic to have very robust text search using all linguistic knowledge of stemming, grammar and syntax tricks.

2. While Lucene is a powerful you cannot have everything with Lucene with out-of-box functionality. As an example, it is relatively easy to configure it to find apples with an "apple" term. Okay. But using the same configuration it will not find you "123" in "12345" string. And forget about "non-readable" texts like application logs. Lucene is a 'google' like engine, it searches texts for humans from human-readable proper texts. To address all sorts of "basic" string matches you will need to write a custom processing code that integrates with Lucene functionality and it is not simple any more.

With Java it is much simpler and quicker to write a BufferedReader scanner that recursively processes the files and folders and searches for exact or partial matches using String.match and String.contains operations.