Zulip: Enable full regex functionality in the search field

[brannerchinese]

Zulip currently seems to use fuzzy search. If I search for "retreat", I get hits including treat, treated, retreating, etc.

That's fine, but it would be useful to be able to search more exactly when you want to. In fact, it would be very useful to have full regex functionality in the search field.

Imagine yourself looking for a message containing either retreating or retreats but not other forms of the word. "Zulip, find me retreat(ing|s)." And all the other good things regex brings to the experience of human life.

For people hoping to use Zulip to discuss literal text (philology), this would be a godsend.

There's the faintest whiff of a request like this in #4109, requesting support for an OR operator, but I don't see other mentions of the idea of full regex support.

[timabbott]

The way that we do things today involves using the postgres built-in full-text search system, with its built-in stemming system. I'm not sure there's a performant way we could do full regexs on top of that model (since obviously there's no way to get a real database index).

So, I think regexs is likely wontfix; but OR is possible as is something like using "retreating" to disable stemming. Might make sense to fork to separate issues for those.

[zulipbot]

Hello @zulip/server-search members, this issue was labeled with the area: search label, so you may want to check it out!

[brannerchinese]

How about wildcards and included/excluded character sets?

[Gittenburg]

I don't think included/excluded character sets would be feasible. Wildcard support is tracked with #364. Closing this since it's a wontfix.