Query words are case sensitive

[milnak]

Problem

Running this command in verbose (-vv) mode:

$ beet list --format '"$title" on "$album" by $albumartist ($length) ($year)' albumartist:kenton 

works

but this doesn't:

$ beet -vv list --format '"$Title" on "$Album" by $AlbumArtist ($Length) ($Year)' AlbumArtist:kenton
(venv-beets) jeff@nuc:~$ beet -vv list --format '"$Title" on "$Album" by $AlbumArtist ($Length) ($Year)' AlbumArtist:kenton
user configuration: /home/jeff/.config/beets/config.yaml
data directory: /home/jeff/.config/beets
plugin paths:
fetchart: google: Disabling art source due to missing key
fetchart: lastfm: Disabling art source due to missing key
Sending event: pluginload
library database: /mount/usb/Music/beets.db
library directory: /mount/usb/Music
Sending event: library_opened
Parsed query: AndQuery([SubstringQuery('albumartist', 'kenton', fast=True)])
Parsed sort: NullSort()
"$Title" on "$Album" by $AlbumArtist ($Length) ($Year)
"$Title" on "$Album" by $AlbumArtist ($Length) ($Year)

Led to this problem:

no query matched. Should query fields (e.g. $year) be case insensitive?

Setup

• OS: ubuntu
• beets version 2.3.1
• Python version 3.12.3
• Turning off plugins made problem go away (yes/no): no

[wisp3rwind]

I'd argue that this is by design. What's the advantage of making this case insensitive?

[milnak]

what's the disadvantage of making this case insensitive? Would one expect that '$Album' and '$album' would be treated differently?

[wisp3rwind]

what's the disadvantage of making this case insensitive? Would one expect that '$Album' and '$album' would be treated differently?

I'd appreciate if instead of simply dismissing the question for your rationale by just asking "why not?", you'd actually argue the value of case-insensitivity. (e.g. how this might be common in other tools, why were you expecting this to work in the first place?)

That said, yes, coming from an in general case-sensitive background of Linux file systems and modern programming languages, I wouldn't expect these terms to be case-insensitive. They really are more like variable names rather than free-form language.

I don't think the documentation suggests in any way that upper case should work. If anything, beets might provide a warning about non-existing queries (but that might not be completely straightforward to set up, given things like flexible attributes, which might only be set for some items).

I'll move this to a discussion, I don't think this should be done unless there's really a wider interest.