The PHP4 bindings for Xapian are packaged in the xapian.so
extension, and largely follow the C++ API. This document lists the differences
and additions. PHP4 strings and arrays, etc., are converted automatically
in the bindings, so generally it should just work as expected.
The examples subdirectory contains examples showing how to use the
PHP4 bindings based on the simple examples from xapian-examples:
simpleindex.php4,
simplesearch.php4.
Assuming you have suitable versions of PHP4 and SWIG installed, running
configure will automatically enable the PHP4 bindings, and
make install will install the extension shared library in
the location reported by php-config --extension-dir.
Check that php.ini has a line like extension_dir =
"<location reported by php-config --extension-dir>".
Then add this line to php.ini: extension = xapian.so (or
whatever the library is called - not all UNIX systems use .so
as the extension, and MS Windows uses .dll).
Depending how PHP is setup, you may need to restart the webserver for this change to take effect.
Alternatively you can add the following line to the start of your PHP scripts:
dl('xapian.so');
In general, a PHP4 fatal error is triggered on a C++ exception being thrown in the library. This is awful, and should be fixed in some useful way - the intention is to rework the core library to not throw exceptions but this is not at trivial job.
The PHP4 bindings do not currently use a PHP4 object orientated style. In order
to construct an object, use $object = new_ClassName(...). Destroy
it using delete_ClassName($object). Invoke methods on an object
using ClassName_method_name($object, ...).
All iterators support next() and equals() methods
to move through and test iterators (as for all language bindings).
MSetIterator and ESetIterator also support prev().
C++ iterators are often dereferenced to get information, eg
(*it). With PHP4 these are all mapped to named methods, as
follows:
| Iterator | Dereferencing method |
| PositionIterator | get_termpos() |
| PostingIterator | get_docid() |
| TermIterator | get_term() |
| ValueIterator | get_value() |
| MSetIterator | get_docid() |
| ESetIterator | get_termname() |
Other methods, such as MSetIterator.get_document(), are
available unchanged.
MSet objects have some additional methods to simplify access (these work using the C++ array dereferencing):
| Method name | Explanation |
get_hit(index) | returns MSetIterator at index |
get_document_percentage(index) | convert_to_percent(get_hit(index)) |
get_document(index) | get_hit(index).get_document() |
get_document_id(index) | get_hit(index).get_docid() |
Xapian::Auto::open_stub(file) is wrapped as open_stub(file)
Xapian::Quartz::open(path) is wrapped as quartz_open(path)
Xapian::Quartz::open() which opens a writable database
is wrapped as quartz_open_writable.
Xapian::InMemory::open() is wrapped as inmemory_open()
Xapian::Remote::open() is wrapped as remote_open() (only
the TCP version is currently wrapped, the "program" version isn't).
Constants are wrapped with the Xapian namespace removed, so
Xapian::DB_CREATE_OR_OPEN is available as
DB_CREATE_OR_OPEN, Xapian::Query::OP_OR is
available as Query_OP_OR, and so on.
There is an additional method get_matching_terms() which takes
an MSetIterator and returns a list of terms in the current query which
match the document given by that iterator. You may find this
more convenient than using the TermIterator directly.