split_search() - A Python functional for advanced search applications

Inspired by Google's way of working I today put together a little script in Python for splitting a search. The idea is that you can search by entering certain keywords followed by a colon like this:

Free Text name:Peter age: 28

And this will be converted into two parts:

'Free Text'
{'name': 'Peter', 'age':'28}

You can configure which keywords should be recognized and to make things simple, you can basically set this to be the columns you have to do advanced search on in your application. For example (from_date,to_date)

Feel free to download and use it as much as you like. You might not agree completely with it's purpose and design so you're allowed to change it as you please.

Here's how to use it:

$ wget https://www.peterbe.com/plog/split_search/split_search.py
$ python
>>> from split_search import split_search
>>> free_text, parameters = split_search('Foo key1:bar', ('key1',))
>>> free_text
'Foo'
>>> parameters
{'key1': 'bar'}

UPDATE

Version 1.3 fixes a bug when all you've entered is one of the keywords.