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From: David Bremner <david@tethera.net>
To: Tomi Ollila <tomi.ollila@iki.fi>,
 Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: Thread subqueries
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References: <20180505160523.9749-1-david@tethera.net>
 <87fu33d5vk.fsf@tethera.net> <878t8qzino.fsf@fifthhorseman.net>
 <87in7ubir6.fsf@tethera.net> <87603uyzay.fsf@fifthhorseman.net>
 <m2bmdl2eia.fsf@guru.guru-group.fi>
Date: Sat, 12 May 2018 11:01:09 -0300
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Tomi Ollila <tomi.ollila@iki.fi> writes:
>
> question: how does these differ (processing-wise):
>
>          $ notmuch count  'thread:"date:1month..now tag:dkg"'

the thread field processor receives the string "date:1month..now tag:dkg"
(without the quotes) which it treats as a thread id, and doesn't match
anything

>          $ notmuch count  'thread:{date:1month..now tag:dkg}'

the t.f.p. receives the string "{date:1month..now"
(without quotes) because the top level query parser splits at spaces,
unless prevented by "". This it considers syntactically invalid, rather
than silently dropping the second term.

>          $ notmuch count 'thread:"{date:1month..now tag:dkg}"'

The t.f.p. receives the string "{date:1month..now tag:dkg}" (without
quotes). It notes the first and last character, and triggers a subquery
expansion.

The thing to keep in mind is that we have no control over the top level
"tokenization" by Xapian, except for using "".