Re: Search for regexp in body

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

> I want to search my collection of ding articles for any instance of
> messages containing information about using message IDs.  I want to do
> the same in Gnus.emacs.gnus.
> 
> I don't want to have to find the messages one by one and read enough
> to see if they are about what I want to know.
> 
> I want to find all instances that contain the info and then be able to
> look at the subject lines and authors in a summary buffer.
> A limited view of the findings.
> 
> Can this be done with currant Quassia-gnus?
> 

There seems to be very little interest in having the ability to generate
a limited view based on a regexp search of text bodies of messages.
Glimpse has been proposed several times as a way to get that result.

In my view Glimpse would be a very weak sister compared to a built in
ability to generate a limited view on the basis of regexp search of
bodies.

With Quassias new abilities as off line reader it now makes sense to be
able to search a group (even across groups) for regexp in bodies and be
presented with a limited view in summary buffer of the findings.
With many articles stored on disk (at least temp.) then a search of this
kind is fast  and very usefull.

Kiboze groups have also been proposed as a similar technique- although
my reading of the sections on it indicate it would be considerably more
involved than a simple regexp search.

I have only limited experience with gnus and emacs or computing in
general so maybe there are reasons why a regexp search of bodies with
limited view is not a practical possiblity.

Is this an off the wall suggestion or what?

-- 

Harry Putnam  reader@newsguy.com