David Bremner <da...@tethera.net> writes: > Matt Armstrong <marmstr...@google.com> writes: > >> Carl Worth <cwo...@cworth.org> writes: >> >>> Hi Gregor, >>> >>> The trick here is that when notmuch is indexing body text it feeds it >>> into a Xapian function that parses the text by finding "terms" in the >>> text. And this parser considers both punctuation and whitespace as >>> separators between terms. >> >> I notice that Xapian supports something called "phrase searches", >> documented as: >> >> "A phrase surrounded with double quotes ("") matches documents >> containing that exact phrase. Hyphenated words are also treated as >> phrases, as are cases such as filenames and email addresses >> (e.g. /etc/passwd or presid...@whitehouse.gov)." >> >> I assume that this particular Xapian feature is unavailable in notmuch? >> If so, I wonder if enabling has ever been considered? > > It is enabled, and documented in notmuch-search-terms(7). Unfortunately > I don't think it's related to the original request. The mention of > hyphenated words is about the input to the query parser, not the > (necessarily) the retrieved text.
Ah, so it boils down to the Xapian definition of "exact phrase." Notably, "exact phrase" is not "identical sequence of characters" as some people might expect. Quick tests with various search engines reveal their phrase search as operating the same way. E.g. searching for "org notmuch" finds all sorts of results: org-notmuch.el notmuchmail.org/notmuch-emacs/ to:devicet...@vger.kernel.org notmuch tag +inbox +unread -new (require 'org-notmuch nil t) https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-emacs/. * imaps://mail.example.org/Notmuch/search For what it is worth, one thing I've taken to doing is using period separators in the notmuch phrase searches I use in scripts and even interactively. Using periods is generally immune to confusing issues related to quoting double quoted things, and always remains a single shell "word." They are also, most often, clearly not the exact content I'm searching for, so they make it clear than the match algorithm is inexact. E.g. subject:notmuch.is.wonderful instead of: subject:"notmuch is wonderful" _______________________________________________ notmuch mailing list notmuch@notmuchmail.org https://notmuchmail.org/mailman/listinfo/notmuch