SUMMARY
When opening the translation memory search (F7) and performing a search, the ‘Query syntax’ checkbox is set to ‘Substring’ by default. But the actual search seems to use a simple search for all strings contains all the words, typically resulting in very many (irrelevant) search results.


STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Ensure that the TM is filled with the contents of many files (‘Tools | Manage translation memories’). Here I have used a translation memory with all the files from the Norwegian Nynorsk KDE translation: svn+ssh://svn@svn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/l10n-support/nn/summit/messages
2. Press F7 to open the TM search.
3. Perform a multi-word search, e.g., ‘play game’
4. Change the ‘Query syntax’ to ‘Wildcard’ and back again to ‘Substring’.
5. Repeat the search.

OBSERVED RESULT
After step 3, the search results is very long (for me: 188 entries) and includes strings that doesn’t contain the chosen substring (‘play game’), e.g.:
"Start a new game to play."
It also includes strings with words that the have the words as part of them:
"A spider playing computer games."

After step 5, a substring search is correctly performed, only resulting in (for me) 3 entries, e.g.:
"Replay game"
"… play games …"


EXPECTED RESULT
The result of step 3 should be equal to the result of step 5.

(It would also be nice if there were an option to restrict the search to whole word / word boundaries, so that ‘play’ wouldn’t match ‘replay’ and ’playing’, but I guess that’s a separate feature request.)


SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20240725
KDE Plasma Version: 6.1.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.4.0
Qt Version: 6.7.2
Kernel Version: 6.9.9-1-default (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5-2500 CPU @ 3.30GHz
Memory: 15.6 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB/PCIe/SSE2
Manufacturer: MSI
Product Name: MS-7673
System Version: 1.0