Fuzzy search box widget with `Shiny` in R?

Question

Has anyone created or seen a Shiny app featuring search box widget giving contextual suggestions as you type, based on fuzzy matching?

Bloomberg terminal uses it, Google uses it. One of the possible underlying technologies is called elasticsearch.org 's fuzzy query, with two R implementations:

duncantl/RElasticSearch
ropensci/elastic

Search box filter coming with the basic Shiny's datatable doesn't quite cut it.

If this is something yet to be integrated with Shiny, any rough guide how to build it? I suspect it would be extremely useful on biggish tables (or documents) with lots of text, when you want to look for specific rows, without displaying the full table.

Are you looking to use this search box widget for a data table? — Anton, Jul 09 '14 at 13:48
Not necessarily. Shiny`s `datatable`'s search box was just an illustration of what currently exists and remotely resembles what I described — Daniel Krizian, Jul 09 '14 at 21:04

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 12 '15 at 13:37

3

Maybe a combobox could be fed a list from stringdist() that would compare the input string against a known list and provide the items with the 10 items with the shortest string distance. Would probably be very inefficient with huge lists, but the algorithm is fairly fast when comparing against a short list.

One of the stringdist methods even compares based on how words are pronounced, not sure if that's useful.

answered Nov 12 '15 at 13:37

Amit Kohli

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This is definitely easier than setting up an elasticsearch server, feeding it data, and writing an observe() function. Could also use `agrep` instead of `stringdist`. – Brandon Bertelsen Oct 09 '18 at 23:08

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 16 '15 at 20:33

3

If you are using selectInput(), then you can set the parameter "choices" to a vector, and the contents of that vector will appear as the user types. The problem with this is that the user cannot select anything that is not contained in the vector.

UI:

selectInput(
    "reference_name", label = h3("Selection"), choices = vector_of_search_possibilities, selectize = TRUE, selected = "Alabama"
  )

SERVER: reference this object using

input$reference_name

answered Nov 16 '15 at 20:33

Hannah Murphy

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thanks. will `vector_of_search_possibilities` update suggestions as-you-type (same experience as google.com searchbox)? – Daniel Krizian Nov 16 '15 at 21:09
yes it will! items that contain the partial string that has already been typed will appear below like suggestions in google – Hannah Murphy Nov 17 '15 at 01:28

Fuzzy search box widget with `Shiny` in R?

2 Answers2