[PATCH 2/3] doc: add material on stemming and wildcards
David Bremner
david at tethera.net
Sun Jan 18 04:59:30 PST 2015
This is lightly massaged from the searching page on the wiki.
---
doc/man7/notmuch-search-terms.rst | 28 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 28 insertions(+)
diff --git a/doc/man7/notmuch-search-terms.rst b/doc/man7/notmuch-search-terms.rst
index 52f6804..3b27053 100644
--- a/doc/man7/notmuch-search-terms.rst
+++ b/doc/man7/notmuch-search-terms.rst
@@ -129,6 +129,34 @@ operators, but will have to be protected from interpretation by the
shell, (such as by putting quotation marks around any parenthesized
expression).
+Stemming
+--------
+
+**Stemming** in notmuch means is that these searches
+
+::
+
+ notmuch search detailed
+ notmuch search details
+ notmuch search detail
+
+will all return identical results, because Xapian first "reduces" the
+term to the common stem (here 'detail') and then performs the search.
+
+There are two ways to turn this off: a search for a capitalized word
+will be performed unstemmed, so that one can search for "John" and not
+get results for "Johnson"; phrase searches are also unstemmed (see
+below for details). Stemming is currently only supported for
+English. Words in other languages will be performed unstemmed unless
+somebody teaches Xapian how to perform stemming for that language.
+
+Wildcards
+---------
+
+It is possible to use a trailing '\*' as a wildcard. A search for
+'wildc\*' will match 'wildcard', 'wildcat', etc.
+
+
Boolean and Probabilistic Prefixes
----------------------------------
--
2.1.4
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