Autocomplete queries

The autocomplete feature is a convenience function that predicts the rest of an input based on the characters a user provides.

Here is an example that provides autocompletion for the field ‘text’:

# We provide 3 characters:
pocket_search.autocomplete(text="inv")[0]
'Inverted file'

Autocomplete works as follows:

• If only one token is entered the query is turned to a prefix query: ^inv* OR inv - thus the characters are searched at the beginning of the given field OR at any arbitrary position in the the field.

• If more tokens are provided (e.g. “inverted f” - separated by whitespaces), only the last token is turned to a prefix query. In this case the query becomes (^inverted OR inverted) AND f*

Some rules apply when using the autocomplete method:

• Lookups are not allowed (e.g. allow_boolean, etc.)

• Special operators are not allowed (e.g. ^ or *)

• You can only provide one field as keyword argument

• .autocomplete returns Query objects, thus you can apply slicing, counting, order_by and highlighting as described in previous chapters. By default 10 suggestions are made.