Re: Search Case Sensitivity

[David Bremner <david@tethera.net>]

Wenlong Dai <whudwl@gmail.com> writes:

> I later realised my statement was wrong. I did not test all search terms.
> I was only testing the folder: search term.
>
> It seems folder: search is always case-sensitive and it doesn't allow wild
> cards.
> So if I want to find messages in a specific folder, I'll have to spell the
> folder name case-sensitively,
> and I'll have to either remember the full path or use regex. Is this
> understanding correct?
> If it is, then I would say it's a bit unexpected and odd.

Yes, that sounds right. folder: (and path:) searches are based on the
paths on disk.  I have to admit I don't use folder searches (or upper
case path names ;)) much, so I leave it to others to discuss whether having
case-insensitive path searches would be worthwhile. Offhand I think it
would require indexing some additional terms, and we'd want to know how
much that increased the database size before deciding.

path: prefixes do support a limited form of wildcards to support
recursive search.  In general Xapian wildcard is somewhat limited,
currently only allowing wildcards at the end of terms. I think that may
change in the future, and could be useful for notmuch queries, since
people are used to globs in paths.