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Highlight Fields

Engine Type Supported?
Crawler-based Engine YES
API-based Engine YES

Highlight query matches within result text for a given field.

Highlighting wraps relevant text in <em></em> tags, which can be styled however you choose.

engine_key
required
The Engine Key associated with your Engine. Found within your dashboard.
q
required
The query used within your search.
highlight_fields
optional
Returns highlighted query matches within the given fields. Expects a DocumentType, a field name, and parameters. The size parameter indicates the number of characters to return. If fallback is set to true, will return raw text instead of a styled result if no exact query matches are found. If false, will return nothing.
Example - Return documents from the books DocumentType that match the query "brothers", highlighting 60 characters of the title field. It will fallback to raw, unstyled results if no matches are found. Crawler based Engines use page as the default DocumentType.
curl -XGET 'https://search-api.swiftype.com/api/v1/public/engines/search.json' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
        "engine_key": "YOUR_ENGINE_KEY",
        "q": "brothers",
        "highlight_fields":{
          "books":{"title":{"size":60,"fallback":true}}
        }
      }'
Example - Use escaped quotes to highlight only an exact match - case insensitive.
curl -XGET 'https://search-api.swiftype.com/api/v1/public/engines/search.json' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
 -d '{
       "engine_key": "YOUR_ENGINE_KEY",
       "q": "\"brothers\"",
       "highlight_fields": {
         "books": { "title": { "size": 60, "fallback": true } }
       }
     }'

Stuck? Looking for help? Contact support or check out the Site Search community forum!