Search for regexp in body

Search for regexp in body

[Harry Putnam]

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?


-- 

Harry Putnam  reader@newsguy.com

Re: Search for regexp in body

[Stefan Waldherr]

>>>>> "Harry" == Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:

  Harry> I want to find all instances that contain the info and then be able
  Harry> to look at the subject lines and authors in a summary buffer.  A
  Harry> limited view of the findings.

  Harry> Can this be done with currant Quassia-gnus?

Nope.

I wrote a backend for glimpse (which is a searchengine) that goes over your
entire mail and returns a list of mails "/home/swa/Mail/inbox/5 ..." that
match a particular expression. Unfortunately my elisp knowledge isn't
sufficient to create a summary buffer from that list. If someone wants to
extend the code, I'm happy to post it.

cu
Stefan.
-- 
Stefan Waldherr                office +1 (412) 268-3837
                                  fax +1 (412) 268-5576
                               e-Mail swa@cs.cmu.edu
                                  www http://www.waldherr.org/

Re: Search for regexp in body

[Harry Putnam]

Stefan Waldherr <swa@cs.cmu.edu> writes:

> >>>>> "Harry" == Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:
> 
>   Harry> I want to find all instances that contain the info and then be able
>   Harry> to look at the subject lines and authors in a summary buffer.  A
>   Harry> limited view of the findings.
> 
>   Harry> Can this be done with currant Quassia-gnus?
> 
> Nope.
> 
> I wrote a backend for glimpse (which is a searchengine) that goes over your
> entire mail and returns a list of mails "/home/swa/Mail/inbox/5 ..." that
> match a particular expression. Unfortunately my elisp knowledge isn't
> sufficient to create a summary buffer from that list. If someone wants to
> extend the code, I'm happy to post it.
> 

Sorry to be a little dense here, but from your quote above
"/home/swa/Mail/inbox/5..." it is not clear how the findings are listed.
Does it list the number of hits in a mailbox or list the messages by
Message ID  or some other way?

In other words, how do you get from running glimpse to reviewing its
findings?

In my limited experience with glimpse, you can have "N" number of lines
printed before and after each occurence of regexp, or some such.  Does
your code display the whole posting or hi-lite only the regexp or what?

-- 

Harry Putnam  reader@newsguy.com

Re: Search for regexp in body

[Stefan Waldherr]

>>>>> "Harry" == Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes: 
 
  Harry> Sorry to be a little dense here, but from your quote above 
  Harry> "/home/swa/Mail/inbox/5..." it is not clear how the findings are 
  Harry> listed.  Does it list the number of hits in a mailbox or list the 
  Harry> messages by Message ID or some other way? 
 
Well, the listing would be something like "/home/swa/Mail/inbox/5
/home/swa/Mail/foo/4711" etc. Internally.
 
  Harry> In other words, how do you get from running glimpse to reviewing its 
  Harry> findings? 
 
Errrr, I don't ;) As I mentioned, I never got past the point of creating that
list. What's missing is the part, where the summary buffer is created based on
that list.
 
Stefan. 
-- 
Stefan Waldherr                office +1 (412) 268-3837
                                  fax +1 (412) 268-5576
                               e-Mail swa@cs.cmu.edu
                                  www http://www.waldherr.org/

Re: Search for regexp in body

[Harry Putnam]

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