query grammar

[icornelius]

Prior to zettelgeist v.1.1.5, queries with zfind worked as described in the baseball tutorial. The grammar of query strings has changed, such that

zfind --database index.db --query-string 'tags:"National League"' --count

is equivalent to

zfind --database index.db --query-string 'tags:"National" | tags:"League"' --count

Both queries return 29 zettels, whereas there are 15 zettels with the tag "National League". (In all examples here index.db is populated by the zettels in zg-tutorial/zettels/baseball.) zfind seems to be handling the space character as the operator OR.

The expected outcome is achieved in this case by joining the search terms with an underscore:

zfind --database index.db --query-string 'tags:"National_League"' --count

Yet the behavior of zfind is stranger than this initial example suggests, as shown by the results of the following queries:

zfind --database index.db --query-string 'tags:"AL Central"' --count
zfind --database index.db --query-string 'tags:"AL_Central"' --count

These two queries return 9 and 6 zettels, respectively.

The first query (for the string "AL Central") returns the five zettels with the tag "AL Central" plus four zettels in which the word-token "AL" does not appear in the tags. (The four false returns have the tags "NL Central" and "National League".) In this case --query-string 'tags:"AL Central"' is not equivalent to --query-string 'tags:"AL" | tags:"Central"'. Something else is going on. What?

The second query (for "AL_Central") returns the five correct zettels plus los-angeles-angels.yaml. Again, I do not understand why.

[icornelius]

Just to clarify: queries for single words have the expected results and can be joined with logical operators (& | !) as documented. The unexpected behaviors occur only when the query string contains two or more words, delimited by the space-character or underscore (e.g. "National League", "NL_Central").