Rules Subject Regex not working

mvilain

I wasn't sure what form of Regex you were supporting (grep, egrep, perl, python, or something else), but I'm having problems using a rule to select based on a subject regex. I have the following rule:

Subject matches regex "[.*1] [a-zA-Z0-9]{6}-[a-zA-Z0-9]{6}-[a-zA-Z0-9]{6}"
apply to "Messages Only" subscription: All Subscriptions

If I click on Apply All or Apply Selected, it fails to select articles such as

Where would I look for logs to see why this is or isn't working. I verified the regex expression with strings on a regex verifications site and it passed this string pattern. I don't know why this rule is failing. Where can I look.

Andre

The regex is compared to the Subject in the header. Not the altered Subject that Usenapp has created.
What you need to do is select the file, open the header and search for the Subject.

mvilain

When I opened one of the target messages, I saw this

I changed the regex to

and ran the rule again. It failed but the site https://regex101.com/ says it's OK.

Where can I look at an analysis of why this regex is failing when it should work?

Andre

You apply the rule to "Messages Only".
Since you are trying to filter out files, you should set this rule to "Files only".

mvilain

I tried Files only and Files and Mesages only for the rule.

Neither worked. How can I actually see what the Regex is doing? Where are the logs that would show this?

Andre

Just to be clear. The regex function only works when fetching new headers. It does not work for headers already on your system. In short, the 'Apply' button does not work for the regex function (see the asterisk).

The regex result is not logged. The only thing that could be logged is 'matched' or 'not matched', so logging this doesn't make much sense. In addition, writing to the log file for each fetched header takes unnecessary time and disk space.

mvilain

Is there a way to apply rules to existing articles? The only way I've been able to test my rules (which now seem to work) is by resetting my subscription to a news group and re-fetching the articles. That's not that useful.

This looks more like a feature request now than a bug. How do I to change that in this forum?

Andre

mvilain Is there a way to apply rules to existing articles?

The downloaded headers are stored in a sqlite database (an Apple implementation) and does not support regex.

Performing a regex search as you requested can be quite a painful and time consuming operation as all downloaded headers must first be read from the database in memory and then compare each of the loaded headers against the regex. That takes forever if you have a lot of headers.

However, I will move your bug/request to the 'requests' forum and will see what can be done, but it won't be ready tomorrow.