Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:05:32 -0400
From: Austin Clements <amdragon@MIT.EDU>
To: Pieter Praet <pieter@praet.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2] emacs: bad regexp @ `notmuch-search-process-filter'
Message-ID: <20110711210532.GC25558@mit.edu>
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Quoth Pieter Praet on Jul 11 at 10:43 pm:
> TL;DR: I can haz regex pl0x?

Oof, what a pain.  I'm happy to change the output format of search; I
hadn't realized how difficult it would be to parse.  In fact, I'm not
sure it's even parsable by regexp, because the message ID's themselves
could contain parens.

So what would be a good format?  One possibility would be to
NULL-delimit the query part; as distasteful as I find that, this part
of the search output isn't meant for user consumption.  Though I fear
this is endemic to the dual role the search output currently plays as
both user and computer readable.

I've also got the code to do everything using document ID's instead of
message ID's.  As a side-effect, it makes the search output clean and
readily parsable since document ID's are just numbers.  Hence, there
are no quoting or escaping issues (plus the output is much more
compact).  I haven't sent this to the list yet because I haven't had a
chance to benchmark it and determine if the performance benefits make
exposing document ID's worthwhile.