Testing presence of a property

Testing presence of a property

[User]

Is there a way to search for headlines which does *not* have set
a particular property? Reading the manual I have the impression
property search has the fixed syntax name=value, so there is no
simple way to search for headers where a property is not yet set
(that is, it has no value).

The only way I found is testing for all possible values, but it's
a bit clumsy (prop<>"value1"+prop<>"value2"+prop<>"value3"...).

Is there a simpler way?

Re: Testing presence of a property

[Nick Dokos]

User <spamfilteraccount@gmail.com> wrote:

> Is there a way to search for headlines which does *not* have set
> a particular property? Reading the manual I have the impression
> property search has the fixed syntax name=value, so there is no
> simple way to search for headers where a property is not yet set
> (that is, it has no value).
> 
> The only way I found is testing for all possible values, but it's
> a bit clumsy (prop<>"value1"+prop<>"value2"+prop<>"value3"...).
> 
> Is there a simpler way?
> 
> 

I don't use properties, but doesn't

  prop=""

work?

I added the following file to my agenda list:

,----
| 
| * head
|   :PROPERTIES:
|   :PROP:     foo
|   :END:
| 
| * tail
|   :PROPERTIES:
|   :PROP:   bar
|   :END:
`----

and I did

    C-c a m PROP="" <RET>

Since none of my normal headlines has the PROP property, I got a buffer
with all the headlines except the above two.

Conversely,

  C-c a m PROP<>"" <RET>

found only those two.

HTH,
Nick

Re: Testing presence of a property

[User]

Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos <at> hp.com> writes:
> 
> I don't use properties, but doesn't
> 
>   prop=""
> 
> work?
> 

Yep, it seems to do the job. Thanks for that.