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From: Yuri D'Elia <wavexx@thregr.org>
To: notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Query operators
Date: Mon, 29 Aug 2016 12:29:03 +0200
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Hi everyone,

I'm a bit baffled by the query syntax. Reading the manual:

``Each term in the query will be implicitly connected by a logical AND
if no explicit operator is provided (except that terms with a common
prefix will be implicitly combined with OR).''

I would have assumed that:

term1 (tag:term2 tag:term3)

would be equivalent to:

term1 AND (tag:term2 AND tag:term3)

but if I read carefully (and by looking at the query results), since
tag: is a common prefix between term2 and term3, it is actually:

term1 AND (tag:term2 OR tag:term3)

am I right? Is this a feature of the xapian query syntax? (can it be
tweaked to _unconditionally_ AND all terms?)

For me, the idea that two terms can be ORed if the prefix is the same
can cause queries to return unexpected results.

What about:

term1 xterm2 xterm3 term2

Is this:

  term1 AND (xterm2 OR xterm3) AND term2

or is it:

  term1 OR xterm2 OR xterm3 OR term2

?