xapian parser bug?

[David Bremner]

Olly Betts <olly at survex.com> writes:

>
> FWIW, I also couldn't reproduce this (I tried with quest and 1.4.7):
>
> $ quest -psubject:S -fdefault,boolean_any_case 'subject:"and"'
> Parsed Query: Query(Sand at 1)
>

Ah, OK, it must have something to do with the way that notmuch is using
field processors. And I see now that the following code (from
lib/regexp-fields.cc) is probably related (at least it explains
subject:" not" works)

            if (str.find (' ') != std::string::npos)
		query_str = '"' + str + '"';
	    else
		query_str = str;

	    return parser.parse_query (query_str, NOTMUCH_QUERY_PARSER_FLAGS, term_prefix);

The motivation for not always triggering phrase processing is that it
breaks/disables wildcards. In particular this change was to fix the
query 'subject:foo*'.  The difficulty here is that the field processor
doesn't know if its string argument was originally quoted.