[notmuch] strange behavior of indexing of and searching for strings containing '[]'
Olly Betts
olly at survex.com
Fri Feb 5 15:48:03 PST 2010
On 2010-02-05, Jameson Rollins wrote:
> Hey, folks. I've been noticing some strange behavior of notmuch search
> results for strings containing '[]'. Here are some searches for some
> exact strings in messages subjects:
The '[]' is a red herring. Xapian's TermGenerator and QueryParser classes
treat these two characters pretty much as if they were spaces.
> servo:~ 0$ notmuch search subject:'emacs paned UI'
Note that the '' is quoting for the shell only here. So Xapian sees:
subject:emacs paned UI
Assuming you are defaulting to an AND search, that's `emacs in the subject'
AND `paned anywhere in the indexed text' AND `UI anywhere in the indexed text'.
To specify a quoted phrase you want "" anyway (not ''), so the command
matching what I think you intended to search for is:
notmuch search 'subject:"emacs paned UI"'
> servo:~ 0$ notmuch search subject:'[notmuch] emacs paned UI'
notmuch search 'subject:"[notmuch] emacs paned UI"'
Which should return identical results to:
notmuch search 'subject:"notmuch emacs paned UI"'
> thread:5f2cb4b108773a39161b33c86e54f7fd 4 mins. ago [1/1] Jameson Rollins;=
> [notmuch] loss of duplicate messages (inbox)
> servo:~ 0$=20
>
> Not only did it not turn up the message that *does* match that exact
> string in it's subject line, it actually turns up a completely different
> message that doesn't match the search term at all!
It matches the notmuch in the subject, and presumably emacs, paned, and UI
in the body.
> [snip the rest - the same explanations apply]
Cheers,
Olly
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