If I just want to test that my query will work vs a term inside a sentence "and am selling an Iphone 3gs", is it possible to use command line to test this? This way I don't need to keep adding to and rotating an index but can simply tweak my query and the data I'd plan on storing. Mainly I am trying to tweak various query parameters like SENTENCE and PROXIMITY vs wordforms/stopwords/ignore_char and would like to be able to work fast and test different query structures vs test words/patterns.
In theory can use BuildExcerpts, to run an arbitrary query, against a block of text (make sure use query_mode=true).
http://sphinxsearch.com/docs/current.html#api-func-buildexcerpts
But even then not totally sure it will completely honour the query, not sure SENTENCE etc will truely work.
... but if you wanting to play with ignore_char etc, you are going to be modifying the index config file. So surely just quickly running indexer to rebuild the index, to see the results is not htat difficult.