Searching for phrases in the body of an email

[Suvayu Ali]

Hi Jani,

On Sat, Jul 18, 2015 at 06:53:53PM +0300, Jani Nikula wrote:
> On Jul 18, 2015 6:32 PM, "Suvayu Ali" <fatkasuvayu+linux at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Sat, Jul 18, 2015 at 10:54:30AM -0400, Xu Wang wrote:
> > >
> > > First note that I believe notmuch search is case insensitive by
> > > default, so your grep should be case insensitive as well.
> >
> > Good point, I tried that, didn't change the numbers much.  The number of
> > matches from grep went up to 24, whereas notmuch count says 463.
> >
> > > More importantly, I'm not sure how 'no NEAR "plain text" ' syntax is
> > > parsed. Maybe it is parsed as {no NEAR plain} or {text}.
> > >
> >
> > Exactly, that's what I do not understand.
> >
> 
> export NOTMUCH_DEBUG_QUERY=1
> 
> might help.

That helped a lot!  This is what I get:

  $ notmuch count -- no NEAR \"plain\ text\"
  Query string is:
  no NEAR "plain text"
  Exclude query is:
  Xapian::Query()
  Final query is:
  Xapian::Query((Tmail AND Zno:(pos=1) AND near:(pos=2) AND Zplain:(pos=3) AND text:(pos=4)))
  465
  $ notmuch count -- \"plain\ text\"
  Query string is:
  "plain text"
  Exclude query is:
  Xapian::Query()
  Final query is:
  Xapian::Query((Tmail AND (plain:(pos=1) PHRASE 2 text:(pos=2))))
  870

I wanted the "plain text" to be treated as a phrase, as in the second
case.  I have tried nesting the quotes.  The closest I got to was this:

  $ notmuch count -- no NEAR 'plain\ text'
  Query string is:
  no NEAR plain\ text
  Exclude query is:
  Xapian::Query()
  Final query is:
  Xapian::Query((Tmail AND (no:(pos=1) NEAR 11 plain:(pos=2)) AND Ztext:(pos=3)))
  151

I then tried this:

  $ notmuch count -- no NEAR \(plain ADJ/1 text\)
  Query string is:
  no NEAR (plain ADJ/1 text)
  Exclude query is:
  Xapian::Query()
  Final query is:
  Xapian::Query((Tmail AND Zno:(pos=1) AND near:(pos=2) AND Zplain:(pos=3) AND (adj:(pos=4) PHRASE 2 1:(pos=5)) AND Ztext:(pos=6)))
  0

Again, this is not what I was expecting.  With the last one, I was
expecting to group "plain" and "text" within a distance of 1, in the
given order, and then requring "no" to be near (within 10 words, the
default) the "plain ADJ/1 text" combination.

Is my understanding of the query language completely wrong?  Apart from
`man notmuch-search-terms', I looked here:
http://xapian.org/docs/queryparser.html

Thanks for any help.

Cheers,

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.