Lucene 4 Cookbook

Implementing highlighting

Highlighting offers the ability to highlight search terms in results, in order to show where matches occur. It helps to improve the user experience by allowing a user to see how matching documents are found. This is especially useful when displaying a text result that contains several lines of text.

The highlighting feature starts with the highlighter class. It can be configured with a formatter and an encoder to render the results. Then, we retrieve a TokenStream from the matching Field and pass it on to the Highlighter to render highlighting results.

Getting ready…

Here is the Maven dependency:

<dependency> <groupId>org.apache.lucene</groupId> <artifactId>lucene-highlighter</artifactId> <version>${lucene.version}</version> ...