Quoth Pieter Praet on Jul 11 at 10:43 pm: > TL;DR: I can haz regex pl0x? Oof, what a pain. I'm happy to change the output format of search; I hadn't realized how difficult it would be to parse. In fact, I'm not sure it's even parsable by regexp, because the message ID's themselves could contain parens. So what would be a good format? One possibility would be to NULL-delimit the query part; as distasteful as I find that, this part of the search output isn't meant for user consumption. Though I fear this is endemic to the dual role the search output currently plays as both user and computer readable. I've also got the code to do everything using document ID's instead of message ID's. As a side-effect, it makes the search output clean and readily parsable since document ID's are just numbers. Hence, there are no quoting or escaping issues (plus the output is much more compact). I haven't sent this to the list yet because I haven't had a chance to benchmark it and determine if the performance benefits make exposing document ID's worthwhile.