Library for searching texts

Question

For a project that searches textual files (mostly unstructured), I would like to use a library that can accomplish the following criteria:

• Fast search of thousands to hundreds of thousands keywords, returning their start and end position
• Limited search for regular expressions (potentially thousands in parallel) (It's hard to describe limited here, I'm mostly using repetitions, wildcards, optional characters)
• Support for searching words

The search results are then processed again:

• Arbitrary logical operations (AND, OR, NOT, combinations)
• Distance checks (e.g. the two keywords are ANDed, but need to occur mostly N characters apart)

Optional, but would be really great:

• Phonetic search
• Resillience to typos

Also, I want to be able to associate certain actions with search hits.

C++ or Java would work for me. Open-source is a must.

Answer 1

The python re & regex libraries are very powerful for this sort of thing and can be combined with multiprocessing to parallelise the work.

Can I also suggest taking a look at Pythons Natural Language Toolkit nltk.

Not C++/Jave but definitely Open Source.