Re: specifying the charset of the query string with nnir/imap

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Daiki Ueno <ueno@unixuser.org> writes:

> I'm using nnir 1.72.

Maybe it would be nice to have search functionality built into Gnus.

How about using a backend interface for the interface?  Then you don't
need to specify the backend to search with nnir, which I found a bit
cumbersome and inflexible.

We could keep the current simple interface -- press `G G' to search
the current group, or the currently processed marked groups for a
simple string -- but also add a fancy "advanced query" form using all
kind of weird widgets.

What about the following backend interface?  IMAP can implement this,
and I guess nnfolder could implement at least the `text' primitive
easily using `search-forward', and nnml could implement it using
`grep'.  Of course, nnml and nnfolder could use Glimpse, Swish++ etc
as well if so configured.

`(nnchoke-request-search-capability &optional GROUP SERVER)'
     This function should return the list of search functions which the
     server (or group, if GROUP is non-nil) supports.  The search
     functions include `and', `or', `not', `text', `to', `from',
     `subject', `cc', `head', `header', `body' and `charset'.  If
     searching is not supported, the empty list should be returned.  It
     is sufficient to implement the `text' search function to get a
     useful search interface, the other functions are only used by the
     advanced query interface.

     There should be no result data returned.

`(nnchoke-request-search-group GROUP QUERY &optional SERVER)'
     This function should search the group for articles matching QUERY,
     returning a range of articles that match the query (or nil if no
     articles match).  The QUERY is a flexible expression looking
     something like:

          (and (subject "Something")
               (text "Something else"))

     The meaning of the primitives is hopefully obvious, however some
     details:

    `header'
          The `header' primitive takes two arguments, one string
          indicating the header to search and one to indicate the
          string to search for.  E.g. `(header "bcc" "myself")'.

    `head'
          On other other hand, the `head' primitive only takes one
          argument and searches the entire header.

    `charset'
          This is a pseduo-primitive, used to wrap other search
          primitives that should search using a certain character set.
          E.g. `(charset "iso-8859-1" (subject "räksmörgås"))'.

     There should be no result data returned.

`(nnchoke-request-search-server QUERY &optional SERVER)'
     This function should search all groups in the server, returning a
     alist containing `group range' elements where GROUP is the
     non-fully qualified name of the group where the RANGE articles
     match the search query (or nil if no articles match).  See
     `nnchoke-request-search-group' for the syntax of QUERY.  This
     function is typically only implemented if the backend can
     efficiently search all groups.

     There should be no result data returned.