Re: Search mails using regular expressions

Adriaan de Groot <[email protected]> Thu, 04 May 2023 22:55:17 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.kde.devel.pim
Organization	KDE.org
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On Thursday, 4 May 2023 17:23:24 CEST Colin Close wrote:
> Are regular expressions currently available in Kmail? The ui interface both
> in filters and in the search dialog indicate that they are. 

In KMail I clicked Tools -> Find Messages (S) and the Find Messages dialog has 
filter criteria. I could pick e.g. "Subject matches regular expr." as a match 
criterium. So it looks like they are.

That said, entering "fina[ln]" does not seem to match that as a regular 
expression at all, although it did find messages with "[LN]" in the subject. 
After trying a couple of other searches, KMail crashed on me.

> I have done my
> best to determine this from the code by grepping for calls to QRegExp but
> this proved fruitless. 

There's also QRegularExpression, so you may need to grep harder. And don't 
forget that KMail uses multiple KDE-PIM libraries, so you may need to search 
beyond the KMail repository only. 

> Can you advise whether the functionality is
> available and just broken or in fact that it is not supported. 

To me -- based on the one experiment described above, I've never used regexp 
searching in subject before  -- it looks broken.

[ade] (just a user of KMail)

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