calibredb inconsistent title: search results

[Terry Brown]

MobileRead Forums post re: calibredb

I am using calibredb from Terminal (and a Python script) in macOS 10.15.4 to retrieve and set various metadata items in my Calibre Library. My problem is that searches of the library using title:”book title” behave unexpectedly.

For example, the following command:

calibredb list -s title:"To Be a Machine" -f title,authors

Results in:

id title authors
96 How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel Charles Yu
797 One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Charles Fishman
Moon
860 Rogue Protocol: The Murderbot Diaries Martha Wells
866 To Be a Machine Mark O'Connell

Why? There is only one title that exactly matches. BookID 96 only matches “to” and “a”; BookID 797 matches “to” only, and BookID 860 doesn’t match anything that I can see.

If I use Calibre GUI’s search box with title:”To Be a Machine”, it only returns the O’Connell book, which is what I expect.

Another example:

calibredb list -s title:"Tool of War" -f title,authors

Gives:

id title authors
607 Tool of War Paolo Bacigalupi

Perfect, but this is inconsistent with the previous example. For instance, doing:

calibredb list -s title:”of war" -f title,authors

Shows:

id title authors
44 The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Goodwin, Doris Kearns
Journalism
68 The Rapture of the Nerds: A Tale of the Singularity, Posthumanity, and Awkward Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross
Social Situations
116 No Less Than Victory: A Novel of World War II Jeff Shaara
142 War of the Whales: A True Story Joshua Horwitz
228 Recollections Of War Terrence L. Brown
287 Flossie's War Terrence L. Brown
355 War Dogs: Ares Rising Greg Bear
550 The Awkward Age Francesca Segal
607 Tool of War Paolo Bacigalupi
633 Warlight Michael Ondaatje
649 Embers of War Gareth L. Powell
762 Dogs of War Adrian Tchaikovsky

In this case the first two are there apparently because the three letter sequence “war” is present within words of the title rather than as whole words. If I do the same search using Calibre GUI search, it only finds book titles that contain the exact phrase “of war”, so it doesn’t find “War of the Whales” for example.

Is there some additional information I need to give calibredb?

[kovidgoyal]

-s 'title:"whatever"'

[Terry Brown]

Brilliant! Works perfectly, thank you.