Kotlin Text Search CLI Tool

Test task

Implement a simple CLI tool in Kotlin that indexes a folder containing text files and then responds to user queries for string occurrences within the files. Focus on implementing basic functionality, ensuring correctness, and handling user errors gracefully. You are allowed to use any libraries.

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Features

• Indexing: Recursively indexes all text files in the specified directory, skipping non-text files and directories named ".KotlinCLISearch" (where indexes are stored).
• Search: Allows users to query the indexed data for specific string occurrences, returning the relevant file paths and contexts where the strings appear (Phrase search - I chose this type of search, because it best suits the search in project files as it is in IDEs).
• Error Handling: Implements graceful error management to guide users through common input mistakes.

Used Libraries

• Kotlin Standard Library: For core language functionality.
• Apache Lucene: For indexing and searching text data.
• Kotlinx-cli: To handle command-line argument parsing.

Inspiration

When implementing this CLI tool, I thought a lot how similar things are implemented in git cli tool:

• where to store inverted index (similar to .git folder),
• how to handle inconsistencies between index and actual folder,
• how to handle deletion/updates of a file inside the indexed folder,
• etc...

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Usage

To use CLI tool download .JAR file from here.

git clone https://github.com/Valentine-456/KotlinCLISearch
cd ./KotlinCLISearch
./gradlew build
./gradlew assemble

# later usage:
java -jar build/libs/KotlinCLISearch-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar index 
java -jar build/libs/KotlinCLISearch-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar search -q "your query here"

To index a folder run:

java -jar path/to/KotlinCLISearch-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar index -p relativePath/to/your/folder

To search a query in a folder run:

java -jar path/to/KotlinCLISearch-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar search -q "your query here" -p relativePath/to/your/folder

In both cases the --path or -p parameter is optional and by default is current working directory.

Notice

If you run index a folder and then change its contents (add, delete or update some file), you may get wrong results of a search. You will need to reindex the folder by using index subcommand again.

java -jar build/libs/KotlinCLISearch-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar index -p relativePath/to/your/folder

Further improvement ideas:

• add more types of search (wildcard, prefix, boolean, etc)
• packaging into an executable and distribution
• create .KotlinCLISearchIgnore (similar to .gitignore) to choose what files to exclude form indexing
• logging and debugging
• interactive search Mode
• add tests
• etc...

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