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POSearching attachments from a Rails app (Word, PDF, Excel etc)
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  1. POSearching attachments from a Rails app (Word, PDF, Excel etc)
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    copied!<p>My first post to Stack Overflow so be gentle please! I am about to start a new Ruby on Rails (3.1) project for a client. One of their requirements is that there is a search engine, which will be indexing roughly 2,000 documents which are a mixture of PDF, Word, Excel and HTML.</p> <p>I had hoped to use either thinking-sphinx or Texticle (most popular at <a href="https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/rails_search.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/rails_search.html</a>) but as I understand it:</p> <ul> <li>Texticle requires PostgreSQL. I'm on MySQL.</li> <li>thinking-sphinx doesn't index files on the file system.</li> <li>even if I saved my attachments into the database, thinking-sphinx still wouldn't work as it requires plain text (according to <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/thinking-sphinx/browse_thread/thread/69cdc1c8e1c096ff" rel="nofollow">http://groups.google.com/group/thinking-sphinx/browse_thread/thread/69cdc1c8e1c096ff</a>)</li> </ul> <p>So I'm left with two options:</p> <ol> <li>Pick a different search tool</li> <li>Try to extract plain-text versions of the attachments into the database for thinking-sphinx to read</li> </ol> <p><strong>Which approach do you recommend?</strong></p> <p>If it's a different search tool, which one? My requirements are pretty basic so I'd really like one that's very easy to set up and has lots of documentation, examples and tutorials!</p> <p>If it's extracting, can you recommend extractors for common file types such as PDF, Word, Excel and HTML?</p> <p>Thanks everyone. Really appreciate your help.</p>
 

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