PhraseMatcher.add() docs should be more explicit about how to pass a list of Doc objects

[ZeroCool2u]

The documentation for PhraseMatcher should be more explicit about how to pass in a list to PhraseMatcher.add().

The documentation specifies the type of the 3rd parameter as *docs or List, which is a bit misleading. *docs is technically correct, but the add() method actually fails when providing a list of Doc objects with the error:

  File "phrasematcher.pyx", line 193, in spacy.matcher.phrasematcher.PhraseMatcher.add
TypeError: an integer is required

Which does not indicate a list cannot be passed. Perhaps it should be more explicit in the example? I lost my morning to this, so I figured I'd make this issue just in case anyone else has the same problem.

Which page or section is this issue related to?

https:/explosion/spaCy/blob/master/website/docs/api/phrasematcher.md

[ines]

Thanks for the detailed report! And yes, I agree – the type Doc would be more appropriate. Fixing!

(On a related note, I can't wait to finally overhaul the {Phrase}Matcher.add methods for spaCy v3). add(str, List[Doc], on_match=None, **kwargs) is a lot more intuitive.

[ZeroCool2u]

Thanks Ines, much appreciated! I ended up building spaCy from source trying to figure this out 😐, so maybe I'll actually be able to contribute to v3 now!

[lock]

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