The query language processor is activated in the GUI simple search entry when the search mode selector is set to Query Language. It can also be used with the KIO slave or the command line search. It broadly has the same capabilities as the complex search interface in the GUI.
The language is roughly based on the (seemingly defunct) Xesam user search language specification.
If the results of a query language search puzzle you and you doubt what has been actually searched for, you can use the GUI show query link at the top of the result list to check the exact query which was finally executed by Xapian.
Here follows a sample request that we are going to explain:
author:"john doe" Beatles OR Lennon Live OR Unplugged -potatoes
This would search for all documents with John Doe appearing as a phrase in the author field (exactly what this is would depend on the document type, ie: the From: header, for an email message), and containing either beatles or lennon and either live or unplugged but not potatoes (in any part of the document).
An element is composed of an optional field specification, and a value, separated by a colon. Exemple: Beatles, author:balzac, dc:title:grandet
The colon, if present, means "contains". Xesam defines other relations, which are not supported for now.
All elements in the search entry are normally combined with an implicit AND. It is possible to specify that elements be OR'ed instead, as in Beatles OR Lennon. The OR must be entered literally (capitals), and it has priority over the AND associations: word1 word2 OR word3 means word1 AND (word2 OR word3) not (word1 AND word2) OR word3. Do not enter explicit parenthesis, they are not supported for now.
An element preceded by a - specifies a term that should not appear. Pure negative queries are forbidden.
As usual, words inside quotes define a phrase (the order of words is significant), so that title:"prejudice pride" is not the same as title:prejudice title:pride, and is unlikely to find a result.
Modifiers can be set on a phrase clause, for exemple to specify a proximity search (unordered). See the modifier section.
Recoll currently manages the following default fields:
title, subject or caption are synonyms which specify data to be searched for in the document title or subject.
author or from for searching the documents originators.
recipient or to for searching the documents recipients.
keyword for searching the document-specified keywords (few documents actually have any).
filename for the document's file name.
ext specifies the file name extension (Ex: ext:html)
The field syntax also supports a few field-like, but special, criteria:
dir for filtering the results on file location (Ex: dir:/home/me/somedir). -dir also works to find results out of the specified directory, only after release 1.15.8. A tilde inside the value will be expanded to the home directory. dir is not a regular field and only one value makes sense in a query (you can't use dir:dir1 OR dir:dir2). Relative paths make sense, for example, dir:share/doc would match either /usr/share/doc or /usr/local/share/doc
size for filtering the results on file size. Exemple: size<10000. You can use <, > or = as operators. You can specify a range like the following: size>100 size<1000. The usual k/K, m/M, g/G, t/T can be used as (decimal) multipliers. Ex: size>1k to search for files bigger than 1000 bytes.
date for searching or filtering on dates. The syntax for the argument is based on the ISO8601 standard for dates and time intervals. Only dates are supported, no times. The general syntax is 2 elements separated by a / character. Each element can be a date or a period of time. Periods are specified as PnYnMnD. The n numbers are the respective numbers of years, months or days, any of which may be missing. Dates are specified as YYYY-MM-DD. The days and months parts may be missing. If the / is present but an element is missing, the missing element is interpreted as the lowest or highest date in the index. Exemples:
2001-03-01/2002-05-01 the basic syntax for an interval of dates.
2001-03-01/P1Y2M the same specified with a period.
2001/ from the beginning of 2001 to the latest date in the index.
2001 the whole year of 2001
P2D/ means 2 days ago up to now if there are no documents with dates in the future.
/2003 all documents from 2003 or older.
Periods can also be specified with small letters (ie: p2y).
mime or format for specifying the mime type. This one is quite special because you can specify several values which will be OR'ed (the normal default for the language is AND). Ex: mime:text/plain mime:text/html. Specifying an explicit boolean operator before a mime specification is not supported and will produce strange results. You can filter out certain types by using negation (-mime:some/type), and you can use wildcards in the value (mime:text/*). Note that mime is the ONLY field with an OR default. You do need to use OR with ext terms for example.
type or rclcat for specifying the category (as in text/media/presentation/etc.). The classification of mime types in categories is defined in the Recoll configuration (mimeconf), and can be modified or extended. The default category names are those which permit filtering results in the main GUI screen. Categories are OR'ed like mime types above. This can't be negated with - either.
Words inside phrases and capitalized words are not stem-expanded. Wildcards may be used anywhere inside a term. Specifying a wild-card on the left of a term can produce a very slow search (or even an incorrect one if the expansion is truncated because of excessive size). Also see More about wildcards.
The document filters used while indexing have the possibility to create other fields with arbitrary names, and aliases may be defined in the configuration, so that the exact field search possibilities may be different for you if someone took care of the customisation.
Some characters are recognized as search modifiers when found immediately after the closing double quote of a phrase, as in "some term"modifierchars. The actual "phrase" can be a single term of course. Supported modifiers:
l can be used to turn off stemming (mostly makes sense with p because stemming is off by default for phrases).
o can be used to specify a "slack" for phrase and proximity searches: the number of additional terms that may be found between the specified ones. If o is followed by an integer number, this is the slack, else the default is 10.
p can be used to turn the default phrase search into a proximity one (unordered). Example:"order any in"p
A weight can be specified for a query element by specifying a decimal value at the start of the modifiers. Example: "Important"2.5.