On 31 Jul 2014, at 19:46, G H uothrawn@yahoo.com wrote:

So Solr 4.0 and higher supports regular expressions in searching. However, Dovecot is quoting search queries in solr_add_definite_query (via solr_add_str_arg). This breaks regex searching. I do a sample search for emails with "merged" in their body via the query /merg.*/. If you look at the Solr logs, it is sending: q=body:"/merg.*/" which is converted to body:\"/merg.*/\" inside Solr.

but if it had sent only: q=body:/merg.*/

then regex would have worked.

Is regular expression searching on the dashboard? I'm considering patching fts-backend-solr.c to not quote-enclose the search, but am looking for any better suggestions. Or perhaps not quote-enclose if the search is prefixed with RX: (ie: "RX:/merg.*/")...

I think if such feature is added it should definitely be optional and disabled by default. Who knows what kind of problems users could cause by getting direct access to that functionality. I guess the possibilities are to either have some kind of a prefix (maybe that's the configurability, fts_solr_passthrough_search_prefix=SOLR:) or maybe have a whole new search parameter that specifies that this is now a direct Solr query (probably too much trouble).