Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2016 16:22:15 -0400
From: Austin Clements <aclements@csail.mit.edu>
To: Gaute Hope <eg@gaute.vetsj.com>
Cc: David Bremner <david@tethera.net>, sfischme@uwaterloo.ca,
 notmuch <notmuch@notmuchmail.org>
Subject: Re: searching: '*analysis' vs 'reanalysis'
Message-ID: <20160606202215.GE7854@csail.mit.edu>
References: <1465196150-astroid-3-33kf2otxir-16915@strange>
 <87lh2ijxor.fsf@tesseract.cs.unb.ca>
 <1465217156-astroid-4-8l08w9cils-2318@strange>
 <877fe2tiy8.fsf@uwaterloo.ca> <878tyins3j.fsf@tesseract.cs.unb.ca>
 <CAH-f9WtC6CeVecfg8wFZUVc8K2rUfzsP72xo97sJX2y_mLW6-g@mail.gmail.com>
 <1465243657-astroid-0-zfssqjwtff-28912@strange>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
In-Reply-To: <1465243657-astroid-0-zfssqjwtff-28912@strange>
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.24 (2015-08-30)
Precedence: list

Quoth Gaute Hope on Jun 06 at  8:08 pm:
> Austin Clements writes on juni 6, 2016 21:20:
> >
> >The experiment was specifically for regexp matching subject, but it should
> >work for any header we store a literal copy of in the database.
> 
> Does it work for terms in the body of the message?

No. It's not impossible that it could be made to work, but it might be
slow and unintuitive. It would have to iterate over all of the terms
in the database and see which ones match the regexp. These are
available, but I don't know how much time it takes to iterate over all
of them. It might be okay. It might not.

It could also expand to a very large query if the regexp matches many
terms, akin to how searching for "a*" can be quite expensive.

And it might not match what you expect. It could only match individual
terms, so a regexp containing any punctuation (including but not
limited to a space) simply wouldn't match anything.