Re: tsearch_extras extension

Hello,

I'm a maintainer of the Zulip open source group chat application.  Zulip depends on a small (~200 lines) postgres extension called tsearch_extras (https://github.com/zbenjamin/tsearch_extras) that returns the actual (offset, length) pairs of all the matches for a postgres full text search query.  This extension allows Zulip to do its own highlighting of the full text search matches, using a more complicated method than what Postgres supports natively.  

I think tsearch_extras is probably of value to others using postgres full-text search (and I'd certainly love to get out of the business of maintaining an out-of-tree postgres extension), so I'm wondering if this feature (or a variant of it) would be of interest to upstream?  

Thanks!

        -Tim Abbott

(See http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/52C7186D.8010504@strangersgate.com#52C7186D.8010504@strangersgate.com for the discussion on postgres mailing lists that caused us to write this module in the first place.)