pyahocorasick 1.1.8

pyahocorasick is a fast and memory efficient library for exact or approximate multi-pattern string search. With the ahocorasick.Automaton class, you can find multiple key strings occurrences at once in some input text. You can use it as a plain dict-like Trie or convert a Trie to an automaton for efficient Aho-Corasick search. Implemented in C and tested on Python 2.7 and 3.4+. Works on Linux, Mac and Windows. BSD-3-clause license.

========================================================================
pyahocorasick
========================================================================

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**pyahocorasick** is a fast and memory efficient library for exact or approximate
multi-pattern string search meaning that you can find multiple key strings
occurrences at once in some input text. The library provides an `ahocorasick` Python
module that you can use as a plain dict-like Trie or convert a Trie to an automaton
for efficient Aho-Corasick search.

It is implemented in C and tested on Python 2.7 and 3.4+. It works on Linux, Mac and
Windows.

The license_ is BSD-3-clause. Some utilities, such as tests and the pure Python
automaton are dedicated to the Public Domain.

Download and source code
========================

You can fetch **pyahocorasick** from:
- GitHub https://github.com/WojciechMula/pyahocorasick/
- Pypi https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyahocorasick/

Documentation
=============

The full documentation including the API reference is published on
`readthedocs <http://pyahocorasick.readthedocs.io/>`_.

Quick start
===========

This module is written in C. You need a C compiler installed to compile native
CPython extensions. To install::

pip install pyahocorasick

Then create an Automaton::

>>> import ahocorasick
>>> A = ahocorasick.Automaton()

You can use the Automaton class as a trie. Add some string keys and their associated
value to this trie. Here we associate a tuple of (insertion index, original string)
as a value to each key string we add to the trie::

>>> for idx, key in enumerate('he her hers she'.split()):
... A.add_word(key, (idx, key))

Then check if some string exists in the trie::

>>> 'he' in A
True
>>> 'HER' in A
False

And play with the ``get()`` dict-like method::

>>> A.get('he')
(0, 'he')
>>> A.get('she')
(3, 'she')
>>> A.get('cat', 'not exists')
'not exists'
>>> A.get('dog')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
KeyError

Now convert the trie to an Aho-Corasick automaton to enable Aho-Corasick search::

>>> A.make_automaton()

Then search all occurrences of the keys (the needles) in an input string (our haystack).

Here we print the results and just check that they are correct. The
`Automaton.iter()` method return the results as two-tuples of the `end index` where a
trie key was found in the input string and the associated `value` for this key. Here
we had stored as values a tuple with the original string and its trie insertion
order::

>>> for end_index, (insert_order, original_value) in A.iter(haystack):
... start_index = end_index - len(original_value) + 1
... print((start_index, end_index, (insert_order, original_value)))
... assert haystack[start_index:start_index + len(original_value)] == original_value
...
(1, 2, (0, 'he'))
(1, 3, (1, 'her'))
(1, 4, (2, 'hers'))
(4, 6, (3, 'she'))
(5, 6, (0, 'he'))

You can also create an eventually large automaton ahead of time and `pickle` it to
re-load later. Here we just pickle to a string. You would typically pickle to a
file instead::

>>> import cPickle
>>> pickled = cPickle.dumps(A)
>>> B = cPickle.dumps(pickled)
>>> B.get('he')
(0, 'he')


See also:
- FAQ and Who is using pyahocorasick? https://github.com/WojciechMula/pyahocorasick/wiki/FAQ#who-is-using-pyahocorasick
- `API overview`_ for more options and the API documentation.
- `Examples`_ for more examples.
- `Build and install`_ for more details on installation.
- `Tests`_ to run unit tests.
- `Support`_ for help and bugs.
- and `Authors`_ and `License`_ .


Introduction
============

With an `Aho-Corasick automaton <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aho-Corasick%20algorithm>`_
you can efficiently search all occurrences of multiple strings (the needles) in an
input string (the haystack) making a single pass over the input string. With
pyahocorasick you can eventually build large automatons and pickle them to reuse
them over and over as an indexed structure for fast multi pattern string matching.

One of the advantages of an Aho-Corasick automaton is that the typical worst-case
and best-case **runtimes** are about the same and depends primarily on the size
of the input string and secondarily on the number of matches returned. While
this may not be the fastest string search algorithm in all cases, it can search
for multiple strings at once and its runtime guarantees make it rather unique.
Because pyahocorasick is based on a Trie, it stores redundant keys prefixes only
once using memory efficiently.

A drawback is that it needs to be constructed and "finalized" ahead of time
before you can search strings. In several applications where you search for several
pre-defined "needles" in a variable "haystacks" this is actually an advantage.

**Aho-Corasick automatons** are commonly used for fast multi-pattern matching
in intrusion detection systems (such as snort), anti-viruses and many other
applications that need fast matching against a pre-defined set of string keys.

Internally an Aho-Corasick automaton is typically based on a Trie with extra
data for failure links and an implementation of the Aho-Corasick search
procedure.

Behind the scenes the **pyahocorasick** Python library implements these two data
structures: a `Trie <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/trie>`_ and an Aho-Corasick string
matching automaton. Both are exposed through the `Automaton` class.

In addition to Trie-like and Aho-Corasick methods and data structures,
**pyahocorasick** also implements dict-like methods: The pyahocorasick
**Automaton** is a **Trie** a dict-like structure indexed by string keys each
associated with a value object. You can use this to retrieve an associated value
in a time proportional to a string key length.

pyahocorasick is available in two flavors:

* a CPython **C-based extension**, compatible with Python 2 and 3.

* a simpler pure Python module, compatible with Python 2 and 3. This is only
available in the source repository (not on Pypi) under the py/ directory and
has a slightly different API.


Some background about pyahocorasick internals
=============================================

I wrote this article about `different trie representations <http://0x80.pl/articles/trie-representation.html>`_.
These are experiments I made while creating this module.


Other Aho-Corasick implementations for Python you can consider
==============================================================

While **pyahocorasick** tries to be the finest and fastest Aho Corasick library
for Python you may consider these other libraries:


* `py_aho_corasick <https://github.com/JanFan/py-aho-corasick>`_ by Jan

* Written in pure Python.
* Poor performance.
* `ahocorapy <https://github.com/abusix/ahocorapy>`_ by abusix

* Written in pure Python.
* Better performance than py-aho-corasick.
* Using pypy, ahocorapy's search performance is only slightly worse than pyahocorasick's.
* Performs additional suffix shortcutting (more setup overhead, less search overhead for suffix lookups).
* Includes visualization tool for resulting automaton (using pygraphviz).
* MIT-licensed, 100% test coverage, tested on all major python versions (+ pypy)
* `noaho <https://github.com/JDonner/NoAho>`_ by Jeff Donner

* Written in C. Does not return overlapping matches.
* Does not compile on Windows (July 2016).
* No support for the pickle protocol.

* `acora <https://github.com/scoder/acora>`_ by Stefan Behnel

* Written in Cython.
* Large automaton may take a long time to build (July 2016)
* No support for a dict-like protocol to associate a value to a string key.

* `ahocorasick <https://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/ahocorasick/>`_ by Danny Yoo

* Written in C.
* seems unmaintained (last update in 2005).
* GPL-licensed.


API overview
============

This is a quick tour of the API for the C **ahocorasick** module.
See the full API doc for more details. The pure Python module has a slightly different interface.

The module ``ahocorasick`` contains a few constants and the main ``Automaton`` class.


.. _Unicode and bytes:


Module constants
----------------

- ``ahocorasick.unicode`` --- see `Unicode and bytes`_

- ``ahocorasick.STORE_ANY``, ``ahocorasick.STORE_INTS``,
``ahocorasick.STORE_LENGTH`` --- see `Automaton class`_

- ``ahocorasick.EMPTY``, ``ahocorasick.TRIE``, ``ahocorasick.AHOCORASICK``
--- see `Automaton Attributes`_

- ``ahocorasick.MATCH_EXACT_LENGTH``, ``ahocorasick.MATCH_AT_MOST_PREFIX``,
``ahocorasick.MATCH_AT_LEAST_PREFIX`` --- see description of the keys method


Automaton class
---------------

Note: ``Automaton`` instances are `pickle-able <https://docs.python.org/3/library/pickle.html>`_
meaning that you can create ahead of time an eventually large automaton then save it to disk
and re-load it later to reuse it over and over as a persistent multi-string search index.
Internally, Automaton implements the ``__reduce__() magic method``.


``Automaton(value_type)``
Create a new empty Automaton optionally passing a `value_type` to indicate what
is the type of associated values (default to any Python object type)

Automaton Trie methods
----------------------

The Automaton class has the following main trie-like methods:

``add_word(key, [value]) => bool``
Add a ``key`` string to the dict-like trie and associate this key with a ``value``.

``exists(key) => bool`` or ``key in ...``
Return True if the key is present in the trie.

``match(key) => bool``
Return True if there is a prefix (or key) equal to ``key`` present in the trie.


Automaton Dictionary-like methods
---------------------------------

A pyahocorasick Automaton trie behaves more or less like a Python dictionary and
implements a subset of dict-like methods. Some of them are:

``get(key[, default])``
Return the value associated with the ``key`` string. Similar to `dict.get()`.

``keys([prefix, [wildcard, [how]]]) => yield strings``
Return an iterator on keys.
``values([prefix, [wildcard, [how]]]) => yield object``
Return an iterator on values associated with each keys.
``items([prefix, [wildcard, [how]]]) => yield tuple (string, object)``
Return an iterator on tuples of (key, value).

Wildcard search
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The methods ``keys``, ``values`` and ``items`` can be called with an optional
**wildcard**. A wildcard character is equivalent to a question mark used in glob
patterns (?) or a dot (.) in regular expressions. You can use any character you
like as a wildcard.

Note that it is not possible to escape a wildcard to match it exactly.
You need instead to select another wildcard character not present in the
provided prefix. For example::

automaton.keys("hi?", "?") # would match "him", "his"
automaton.keys("XX?", "X") # would match "me?", "he?" or "it?"

Aho-Corasick methods
--------------------

The Automaton class has the following main Aho-Corasick methods:

``make_automaton()``
Finalize and create the Aho-Corasick automaton.

``iter(string, [start, [end]])``
Perform the Aho-Corasick search procedure using the provided input ``string``.
Return an iterator of tuples (end_index, value) for keys found in string.

AutomatonSearchIter class
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Instances of this class are returned by the ``iter`` method of an ``Automaton``.
This iterator can be manipulated through its `set()` method.

``set(string, [reset]) => None``
Set a new string to search eventually keeping the current Automaton state to
continue searching for the next chunk of a string.

For example::

>>> it = A.iter(b"")
>>> while True:
... buffer = receive(server_address, 4096)
... if not buffer:
... break
... it.set(buffer)
... for index, value in it:
... print(index, '=>', value)

When ``reset`` is ``True`` then processing is restarted. For example this code::

>>> for string in string_set:
... for index, value in A.iter(string)
... print(index, '=>', value)

does the same job as::

>>> it = A.iter(b"")
>>> for string in string_set:
... it.set(it, True)
... for index, value in it:
... print(index, '=>', value)


Automaton Attributes
--------------------

The Automaton class has the following attributes:

``kind`` [readonly]
Return the state of the ``Automaton`` instance.

``store`` [readonly]
Return the type of values stored in the Automaton as specified at creation.

Other Automaton methods
-----------------------

The Automaton class has a few other interesting methods:

``dump() => (list of nodes, list of edges, list of fail links)``
Return a three-tuple of lists describing the Automaton as a graph of
(nodes, edges, failure links).
The source repository and source package also contains the ``dump2dot.py``
script that converts ``dump()`` results to a `graphviz <http://graphviz.org>`_ dot
format for convenient visualization of the trie and Automaton data structure.

``get_stats() => dict``
Return a dictionary containing Automaton statistics.
Note that the real size occupied by the data structure could be larger because
of `internal memory fragmentation <http://en.wikipedia.org/Memory%20fragmentation>`_
that can occur in a memory manager.

``__sizeof__() => int``
Return the approximate size in bytes occupied by the Automaton instance.
Also available by calling sys.getsizeof(automaton instance).


Examples
========

::

>>> import ahocorasick
>>> A = ahocorasick.Automaton()

>>> # add some key words to trie
>>> for index, word in enumerate('he her hers she'.split()):
... A.add_word(word, (index, word))

>>> # test that these key words exists in the trie all right
>>> 'he' in A
True
>>> 'HER' in A
False
>>> A.get('he')
(0, 'he')
>>> A.get('she')
(3, 'she')
>>> A.get('cat', '<not exists>')
'<not exists>'
>>> A.get('dog')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
KeyError

>>> # convert the trie in an Aho-Corasick automaton
>>> A.make_automaton()

>>> # then find all occurrences of the stored keys in a string
>>> for item in A.iter('_hershe_'):
... print(item)
...
(2, (0, 'he'))
(3, (1, 'her'))
(4, (2, 'hers'))
(6, (3, 'she'))
(6, (0, 'he'))


Example of the keys method behavior
-----------------------------------

::

>>> import ahocorasick
>>> A = ahocorasick.Automaton()

>>> # add some key words to trie
>>> for index, word in enumerate('cat catastropha rat rate bat'.split()):
... A.add_word(word, (index, word))

>>> # Search some prefix
>>> list(A.keys('cat'))
['cat', 'catastropha']

>>> # Search with a wildcard: here '?' is used as a wildcard. You can use any character you like.
>>> list(A.keys('?at', '?', ahocorasick.MATCH_EXACT_LENGTH))
['bat', 'cat', 'rat']

>>> list(A.keys('?at?', '?', ahocorasick.MATCH_AT_MOST_PREFIX))
['bat', 'cat', 'rat', 'rate']

>>> list(A.keys('?at?', '?', ahocorasick.MATCH_AT_LEAST_PREFIX))
['rate']


Build and install
=================

To install for common operating systems, use pip. Pre-built wheels should be
available on Pypi at some point in the future::

pip install pyahocorasick

To build from sources you need to have a C compiler installed and configured which
should be standard on Linux and easy to get on MacOSX.

On Windows and Python 2.7 you need the `Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler for Python 2.7
<https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44266>`_ (aka. Visual
Studio 2008). There have been reports that `pyahocorasick` does not build yet with
MinGW. It may build with cygwin but this has not been tested. If you get this working
with these platforms, please report in a ticket!

To build from sources, clone the git repository or download and extract the source
archive.

Install `pip` (and its `setuptools` companion) and then run (in a `virtualenv` of
course!)::

pip install .

If compilation succeeds, the module is ready to use.


Unicode and bytes
-----------------

The type of strings accepted and returned by ``Automaton`` methods are either
**unicode** or **bytes**, depending on a compile time settings (preprocessor
definition of ``AHOCORASICK_UNICODE`` as set in `setup.py`).

The ``Automaton.unicode`` attributes can tell you how the library was built.
On Python 3, unicode is the default. On Python 2, bytes is the default and only value.


.. warning::

When the library is built with unicode support on Python 3, an Automaton will
store 2 or 4 bytes per letter, depending on your Python installation. When built
for bytes, only one byte per letter is needed.

Unicode is **NOT supported** on Python 2 for now.


Tests
=====

The source repository contains several tests. To run them use::

make test


Support
=======

Support is available through the `GitHub issue tracker
<https://github.com/WojciechMula/pyahocorasick/issues>`_ to report bugs or ask
questions.


Contributing
============

You can submit contributions through `GitHub pull requests
<https://github.com/WojciechMula/pyahocorasick/pull>`_.


Authors
=======

The main author: Wojciech Muła, [e-mail]
This library would not be possible without help of many people, who contributed in
various ways.
They created `pull requests <https://github.com/WojciechMula/pyahocorasick/pull>`_,
reported bugs as `GitHub issues <https://github.com/WojciechMula/pyahocorasick/issues>`_
or via direct messages, proposed fixes, or spent their valuable time on testing.

Thank you.


License
=======

This library is licensed under very liberal
`BSD-3-Clause <http://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause.html>`_ license. Some portions of
the code are dedicated to the public domain such as the pure Python automaton and test
code.

Full text of license is available in LICENSE file.