Overview

Mensa is a generic, flexible, enhanced, and efficient Java implementation of a pattern matching state machine as described by the 1975 paper by Alfred V. Aho and Margaret J. Corasick: Efficient string matching: An aid to bibliographic search¹ This implementation is

• generic in that it can be used to match any type of symbols as defined by the Java template type S — e.g., it is possible to create a machine to match bytes, characters, integers, gene sequences, bit sequences, etc.;
• flexible in that the architecture allows for granular extension, customization, or replacement of framework components;
• enhanced in that it supports a number of useful extension not addressed in the original paper, such as whole-word matching, case-sensitivity controls, fuzzy whitespace matching, fuzzy punctuation matching, incremental matching (i.e., iterators), matching event listeners, etc.; and
• efficient in that it performs well in terms of both time and resource usages on very large (~million term) keyword sets.

Resources

The following are the primary Mensa resources:

• Source code: Source code can be downloaded from this Github project:

    https://github.com/dell-oss/Mensa
  

• Documentation: There are two primary sources of documentation: the Mensa Wiki and the API Java docs. The wiki contains details on building Mensa, tutorials, examples, contributor information, and more. The API java docs are generated as part of the build process and contain detailed API documentation.

• Issues: Please feel free to post bug reports and feature enhancements in the Github Issues area:

    https://github.com/dell-oss/Mensa/issues
  

• Downloads: Binaries may be downloaded from the Releases page. Source, binary, and doc download bundles will be available soon from Maven Central. Stay tuned!

Requirements

Mensa requires Java 1.7 or higher. Maven 3.2.3 or higher is needed to run automated build scripts.

License

Mensa is available under the Apache License Version 2.0. See LICENSE.txt or http://www.apache.org/licenses/ for a copy of this license.

Contributors

For a list of contributors, as well as information on how you can contribute, please see the Contributors page in the Mensa Wiki.

Mensa was created by F. Andy Seidl and released as open source by Dell Software.

Footnotes

1. Aho, Alfred V.; Corasick, Margaret J. (June 1975). Efficient string matching: An aid to bibliographic search. Communications of the ACM 18 (6): 333–340. doi: 10.1145/360825.360855 ↩