How to keep cts:highlight from matching inside XML tags? - api

Question

I am trying to search some content and highlight the search strings present in the XML content(like google) in MarkLogic using REST API. The problem is when I am including "ME" in the search-string,it's highlighting the 'i' tags(html Italic tags) along with the "Me" in the content. I have created a document with some elements and running a word-query on the document.
For example XML content:
<resources>
<title> some data from me</title>
<desc> more data <i> from </i> somewhere by me </desc>
</resources>
I have created a document with root node 'resources' and child elements 'title' and 'desc' and searching the search strings within the document using word-query.
Now when i search for "some me" ,its retrieving the content like
<resources>
<title> <<span class="highlight">some</span> data from <<span class="highlight">me</span>
</title>
<desc> more data <<span class="highlight">i</span>> from <<span class="highlight">i</span>> somewhere by <span class="highlight">me</span> </desc>
</resources>
Url:
localhost:9000/v1/search?q=some me&collection=Data&start=0&pageLength=10&options=Transformation&format=json
I am using cts:highlight for highlighting,some thing like :
cts:highlight($final-result, $query, fn:concat('<span class="highlight">',$cts:text,'</span>')), $custom-config)
Any ideas on why the html elements are highlighted here?
Thanks in Advance.

Answer 1

You probably inserted your document in text format, not xml format. I can reproduce your issue by inserting in text format:
xdmp:document-insert("test.xml", text {"<resources>
<title> some data from me</title>
<desc> more data <i> from </i> somewhere by me </desc>
</resources>"})
then running a cts:highlight on that document:
cts:highlight(doc("test.xml"), cts:parse("some me"), concat('<span class="highlight">', $cts:text, '</span>'))
But if I re-insert the document as XML:
xdmp:document-insert("test.xml", <resources>
<title> some data from me</title>
<desc> more data <i> from </i> somewhere by me </desc>
</resources>)
then the same cts:highlight works better:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<resources>
<title> <span class="highlight">some</span> data from <span class="highlight">me</span></title>
<desc> more data <i> from </i> somewhere by <span class="highlight">me</span> </desc>
</resources>
If I add the suggestion from #ehennum and #mholstege and instead run this cts:highlight:
cts:highlight(doc("test.xml"), cts:parse("some me"), <span class="highlight">{$cts:text}</span>)
then I get what I would guess you're looking for:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<resources>
<title> <span class="highlight">some</span> data from <span class="highlight">me</span></title>
<desc> more data <i> from </i> somewhere by <span class="highlight">me</span> </desc>
</resources>

Answer 2

What version of MarkLogic is this?
Can you include a more complete example? What is $custom-config for example? And how is the REST call results linked to cts:highlight? For markup to be highlighted in this way, that results would have to be text rather than XML.
By the way, the third argument to cts:highlight is an expression -- if you want to create markup, just use constructors there, not string concatenation:
cts:highlight($final-result, $query, <span class="highlight">{$cts:text}</span>, $custom-config)

Answer 3

Try supplying the tags in the cts:hightlight() expression as nodes instead of a string.
That is, instead of
fn:concat('<span class="highlight">',$cts:text,'</span>')
try
<span class="highlight">{$cts:text}</span>
For more information, see the first example in:
http://docs.marklogic.com/cts:highlight?q=cts:highlight
Hoping that helps,