search by date range

search by date range

[Philippe LeCavalier]

Hi.

I really like searching my inde by date and I came across a post that I
can't seems to find for the life of me regarding the functionality of
doing such a thing. I'll I'm left with is this[1] and I can't figure out
what the heck it is. I do know that what it does do is limit mail from
two weeks back to present. I suppose the omition at .. implies present
but what the number represent and how to I play with that?

-- 
Thanks,
Phil

Re: search by date range

[Jani Nikula]

On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 12:58:00 -0500, Philippe LeCavalier <support@plecavalier.com> wrote:
> I really like searching my inde by date and I came across a post that I
> can't seems to find for the life of me regarding the functionality of
> doing such a thing. I'll I'm left with is this[1] and I can't figure out
> what the heck it is. I do know that what it does do is limit mail from
> two weeks back to present. I suppose the omition at .. implies present
> but what the number represent and how to I play with that?

Hi Philippe -

Out of the box you have the date search syntax described in 'man
notmuch-search-terms', i.e. specifying a date range in terms of
timestamps. Not very user friendly, but can be helped a little by using
date(1) to produce the timestamps. See the man page.

Quite some time ago I posted patches to add gnulib date search, but the
gnulib semantics, while compatible with other GNU programs, are a bit
awkward for the needs of notmuch. Plus it's plenty of code. See
id:"cover.1312964528.git.jani@nikula.org" for the patches (they may not
apply anymore though).

Finally, I've been working on adding support for a decent date range
search. It still needs some polish and tests, but seeing the demand,
perhaps I should just post the patches and see what happens.


BR,
Jani.

Re: search by date range

[Jameson Graef Rollins]

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On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:39:04 +0200, Jani Nikula <jani@nikula.org> wrote:
> Finally, I've been working on adding support for a decent date range
> search. It still needs some polish and tests, but seeing the demand,
> perhaps I should just post the patches and see what happens.

A while back Austin also worked on a custom query parser [0] that
supported more natural language date specification.  He has threatened
to resurrect that patch set as well.

jamie. 

[0] id:"1293084024-7893-1-git-send-email-amdragon@mit.edu"

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Re: search by date range

[Austin Clements]

Quoth Jameson Graef Rollins on Feb 18 at  4:40 pm:
> On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:39:04 +0200, Jani Nikula <jani@nikula.org> wrote:
> > Finally, I've been working on adding support for a decent date range
> > search. It still needs some polish and tests, but seeing the demand,
> > perhaps I should just post the patches and see what happens.
> 
> A while back Austin also worked on a custom query parser [0] that
> supported more natural language date specification.  He has threatened
> to resurrect that patch set as well.
> 
> jamie. 
> 
> [0] id:"1293084024-7893-1-git-send-email-amdragon@mit.edu"

Really you want v2, id:"1295165458-9573-1-git-send-email-amdragon@mit.edu"

Ideally we would use a combination of my query parser and Jani's date
parser.  The date parser I included with my query parser was just a
simple demonstration whereas Jani's parser (I hear) is much more
complete but has some peculiarities that stem from Xapian's query
parser (like not being able to use spaces in dates).