Boolean search

TNTSearch supports boolean search with AND, OR, and NOT operators, as well as grouping with parentheses. This gives your users fine-grained control over search queries.

Basic usage

Use the searchBoolean() method instead of search():

$tnt = new TNTSearch;
$tnt->loadConfig($config);
$tnt->selectIndex('articles.index');

$results = $tnt->searchBoolean('romeo juliet');

Operators

AND (implicit)

Words separated by spaces are combined with AND. All words must appear in the document:

// Documents must contain BOTH "romeo" AND "juliet"
$results = $tnt->searchBoolean('romeo juliet');

OR

Use or between words to match documents containing either term:

// Documents containing "hamlet" OR "macbeth"
$results = $tnt->searchBoolean('hamlet or macbeth');

NOT

Use the tilde ~ prefix to exclude documents containing a term:

// Documents with "juliet" but NOT "romeo"
$results = $tnt->searchBoolean('juliet ~romeo');

// Documents with "hamlet" but NOT "king"
$results = $tnt->searchBoolean('hamlet ~king');

Combining operators

You can combine all operators in a single query:

// Documents with "hamlet" OR "superman"
$results = $tnt->searchBoolean('hamlet or superman');

// Documents with "juliet" but NOT "well"
$results = $tnt->searchBoolean('juliet ~well');

// Documents with "eldred" but NOT "bar"
$results = $tnt->searchBoolean('eldred ~bar');

Return format

The searchBoolean() method returns the same format as regular search:

[
    'ids'            => [3, 4, 1, 2],     // matching document IDs
    'hits'           => 4,                  // total number of matches
    'execution_time' => '0.234 ms'          // execution time
]

How it works

Internally, TNTSearch converts your boolean query to postfix notation using the shunting-yard algorithm, then evaluates it as set operations:

• AND (&) - intersection of document sets
• OR (|) - union of document sets
• NOT (~) - difference (removes documents from the set)

Stemming is applied to all search terms automatically, so boolean queries also benefit from word variation matching.