Re: [Pan-users] Select Headers with RE in the Subject/Author Entryfield?

[Duncan]

Heinz Mezera posted on Tue, 09 Jun 2015 17:16:24 +0200 as excerpted:

> Hello Duncan,
> 
> your answer appears to be a short explaination of regex,

Yes.  Most questions of that type here are from people who don't know 
regex, but...

> but does not work as expected.  No matter what expresiion I enter into
> the search field the headerlist will be totally empty. To make sure
> it's not an error in the regex I tried
> 
> ^.*$
> 
> I think the above expresiion should show all headers, but the header
> list is totally empty.

... it seems you know regex well enough, and it's simply not working as 
expected.

Three possibilities I can think of, listed here with what I consider the 
most likely possibility first.  Hopefully it's the first or last as they 
have the simplest workarounds:

1) Did you take note of my "**Note..." bit?  In my testing for my first 
reply, I discovered that while the filtering is designed to be dynamic, 
reacting as you type, sometimes the regex filter gets "stuck" showing no 
headers.

The workaround for me was simple.  Toggle the filter type to something 
other than regex (like subject), then back.  Of course with regex special 
chars in the expression, it probably won't match anything when toggled to 
one of the literal match choices, but toggling it back to regex, at least 
here, "magically unstuck" the regex so it worked again, and I got the 
matches I expected... at least until I typed something else in the filter 
box again and it eventually stuck, again.

2) Maybe you are on a buggy version?

It might be that the pan 0.139, git bf56508 (presumably 0.139 release), 
that you posted as your version in the OP, is simply buggy in this regard.

I run pan built from live-git sources, with my current build's commit ID 
shown in my headers since I'm replying with pan (via gmane.org's list2news 
service).  As I mentioned, I've been testing for my replies, and the regex 
filters are definitely working here -- the ^.*$ above has the expected 
result.

So live-git pan is known to work.  If necessary, you can try building 
it.  If you do that and it's still not working, then pan's code would be 
in the clear as it's working here, and it'd have to be either in your 
config (unlikely for this issue) or a bug in one of the libraries that 
pan uses, on your system.

3) Clearing the filter entirely shows headers, right?

I normally have pan set to show only unread messages (to be clear, view 
menu, header pane, both show matching articles (only) and match only 
unread).  I once set it to show only my own posts as well, did what I was 
going to do with it set that way... and promptly forgot I had set it.

Of course when I next fetched new headers, the new headers I expected 
didn't show up!  It took me several hours and a number of test posts, 
troubleshooting, before I more or less accidentally figured out that I 
still had show only my own posts still toggled on, and that was why 
nothing else was showing up!

So the question above might sound dumb but sometime's it's necessary.  
With the filter cleared, you're seeing the expected message list, thus 
clearing the possibility that it's some other setting like my match my 
own posts only mistake, that's the actual problem, right? =:^)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman