Regexp search of body/w limited view Oh-Boy

Regexp search of body/w limited view Oh-Boy

[Harry Putnam]

Gnus can do a regexp body search, or an arbitrary header search and be made
to produce a limited view!  (probably old news to the old hands- but a nice
discovery to a neophite)

I have posted on this subject a couple of times in the past. Making a
feature request and what not.  No one offered this particular method of
searching groups, so I will assume it is not widely used.  And there are
some good reasons why it wouldn't be very popular, But . . . .

A limited view of the output of a full body search can be done with
scoring commands.  Here is one way:

>From directions available at Gnus Info node "Scoring"

Using the 'I' increase, technique you can pick the 'b' = body and when
prompted put in your string.  I used 'kiboze' against the emacs.ding
list.  (some 800 messages)  

It makes no difference which style expression you choose since gnus will
convert it for you.

You must use either 'Permanent' or 'temporary' at that prompt, since
'i'(immediate) will not work.

Once the scoring is completed you can limit the view to that score and
there are the results of the body search in a handy dandy window where
they can be further sorted and manipulated.

There are a several  'caveats'  to this: 

1) I can't find a way to do this with out actually putting it in the
score file. So if you don't want to jack up your score files, you can
use the 'V c' command to use a different score file temporarily.
I put a generic '.SCORE" file in /News called a very inventive 
'generic.SCORE' file.  Its syntax looks like this for kiboze at 2000

(("body"
  ("kiboze" 2000 nil r))

2)  This procedure is slower than the 'second coming' .  It took a full
seven minutes to search about 800 articles.  And that is with the articles
on disk.  So Gnus doesn't have to  go on-line.  

That is, all the articles are ticked and cached. But Gnus seems to go on
line anyway, to do the scoring.

Of course with other
things to do the wait can be unimportant.

The same search, done with M-s (regexp-search-forward) takes only 1.8
minutes to find the same 4 articles.  But of course you must view them
one by one.

3) At any rate it is clearly doing something quite different than a normal
search  but the  functionality is there.
How hard might it be to enhance this existing function into a full
fledged feature?


4) This can not be done 'unplugged' at all.  Unfortunate, because that is
when it would be most likely to do it.
Apperantly, what ever is in the Gnus.el files that allows this body
search, is not part of the 'agent' library.

Back trace:

Signaling: (error "No such function: nnagent-request-body")
  signal(error ("No such function: nnagent-request-body"))
  error("No such function: %s" nnagent-request-body)
  gnus-get-function((nntp "sunsite.auc.dk") request-body)
  gnus-request-body(2232 "nntp+sunsite.auc.dk:emacs.ding")
  gnus-score-body((((touched nil) ("body" ...))) "body" 729460 729453 nil)
  gnus-score-headers(("/home/reader/News/nntp+sunsite.auc.dk/emacs/ding/SCORE") nil)
  gnus-possibly-score-headers()
  gnus-summary-rescore()
* call-interactively(gnus-summary-rescore)

5)  Scoring cannot be done on a selected number of articles, it seems it
is all or nothing.  So you can't limit the view to a subject and then do
a body search.  At least I didn't see a way. 



6)  Don't for get to flush the score cache between
edits ('V F') in summary buffer ('W f') in group buffer.


I hope this funcdionality can be beefed up.  At present it is a very
weak technique, but it works.

-- 

Harry Putnam  reader@newsguy.com