Matching subwords

[Florian Lindner]

Hello,

I recall having read a discussion about that, but can't remember the outcome nor find it.

A feature I miss very much in mu is matching subwords, i.e. a query for "funktionen" also returns "funktionentheorie", "sinusfunktionen", ... It is especially important for languages such as German that use a lot of inflection, i.e. modify words to express grammatical categories.

Is is probably not a restriction of mu, but rather of the indexer (xapian? lucene?) it is based on. Is there any change that this would be realised in mu?

Best Regards,
Florian

[Tamas Papp]

Hi,

funktionen* should match funktionentheorie, but I don't know if there is
a way to match prefixes.

Best,

Tamas

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2016-02-19, at 10:21, Tamas Papp <tkp...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> funktionen* should match funktionentheorie, but I don't know if there is
> a way to match prefixes.

AFAIK, no, but in a pinch you can simply M-x rgrep your Maildir. Of
course, this will be considerably slower.

BTW, I think that a grep-based search (as an alternative for when
prefixes are not enough) would be a nice addition to mu4e.

> Best,
>
> Tamas

Best,

--
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University

[Dirk-Jan C. Binnema]

Xapian doesn't support sub-words.

It does have some language-specific 'stemming' though[1], that would
allow for variations of words to match (e.g., plural/singular or case
inflections). But for that to work, you'd need some automatic language
detection - e.g. using ngrams.

Kind regards,
Dirk.

[1] https://xapian.org/docs/stemming.html

--
Dirk-Jan C. Binnema Helsinki, Finland
e:dj...@djcbsoftware.nl w:www.djcbsoftware.nl
pgp: D09C E664 897D 7D39 5047 A178 E96A C7A1 017D DA3C

[Tamas Papp]

I wonder if it would be possible to do the following:

1. for a given regexp, list all keys in the database that match,
2. search for those keys.

Eg .*funktionen.* would match funktionen, funktionentheorie,
sinusfunktionen, then one could run a query on all of them.

I don't know if 1. is feasible in Xapian though.

best,

Tamas