On 2010-02-05, Jameson Rollins wrote: > Hey, folks. I've been noticing some strange behavior of notmuch search > results for strings containing '[]'. Here are some searches for some > exact strings in messages subjects: The '[]' is a red herring. Xapian's TermGenerator and QueryParser classes treat these two characters pretty much as if they were spaces. > servo:~ 0$ notmuch search subject:'emacs paned UI' Note that the '' is quoting for the shell only here. So Xapian sees: subject:emacs paned UI Assuming you are defaulting to an AND search, that's `emacs in the subject' AND `paned anywhere in the indexed text' AND `UI anywhere in the indexed text'. To specify a quoted phrase you want "" anyway (not ''), so the command matching what I think you intended to search for is: notmuch search 'subject:"emacs paned UI"' > servo:~ 0$ notmuch search subject:'[notmuch] emacs paned UI' notmuch search 'subject:"[notmuch] emacs paned UI"' Which should return identical results to: notmuch search 'subject:"notmuch emacs paned UI"' > thread:5f2cb4b108773a39161b33c86e54f7fd 4 mins. ago [1/1] Jameson Rollins;= > [notmuch] loss of duplicate messages (inbox) > servo:~ 0$=20 > > Not only did it not turn up the message that *does* match that exact > string in it's subject line, it actually turns up a completely different > message that doesn't match the search term at all! It matches the notmuch in the subject, and presumably emacs, paned, and UI in the body. > [snip the rest - the same explanations apply] Cheers, Olly