Re: [Nmh-workers] UTF-8 message bodies

[Paul Fox]

aleksander wrote:
 > Ken Hornstein writes:
 > 
 > > >It is possible to keep almost unchanged state with addition of
 > > >one more clause to mhbuild like pair #off #on which marks the
 > > >region where ^# is not interpreted as directive.
 > > 
 > >  But to me it seems dumb that # characters can't be in the
 > >  beginning of a line, and having people have to know about
 > >  #on/#off directives just seems like the wrong solution.  [..]
 > >  But if you run "mime" at a WhatNow?  prompt then presumably
 > >  you're smart enough to know you have to escape any leading #
 > >  characters.
 > 
 > I'm trying to write as short as possible (to make less gramar
 > mistakes =:-)), but sometimes it is too short.
 > 
 > Suppose, you use automimeproc: 1 and you want to include (as a
 > part of the message) some lines from program source, shell script
 > or whatever.
 > 
 > You can type
 > #off
 > :r whatever (or copy by mouse)
 > #on
 > and do not have to edit (and remember to edit) included part to escape 
 > leading #.
 > 
 > As the additional directive, user doesn't have to know about it
 > unless he needs it.

thanks for re-explaining -- i didn't get it the first time either.  i
think this is a good idea.  one could imagine a config option which
set the initial state, so that someone else could do:

  #on
  #text/plain; name="foo" [ - ] /tmp/foo
  #off

if that's how they prefer to work.

to answer ken's question:  i use automimeproc for the directives, and
am willing to reformat mail slightly to move leading '#' characters when
i get errors[1][2].  and i prefer not to have to type "mime" at the
whatnow prompt, because i'm sure it would result in my recipients
receiving a lot of mhbuild directives from me.

paul

[1] someone mentioned escaping:  thanks -- it looks like doubling the
    '#' character, just at the beginning of the line, will get you a
    single # in the output.  is that right?

[2] i also invoke mhbuild via a wrapper, that does this, in part:
    ...
    # scan for '#!', '#<whitespace>', which probably mean this
    # is a shell script, or other #-commented script, and not mime input.
    # also check for common C-preprocessor tokens.
    if egrep '^#[   !]|^#include|^#if|^#def|^#undef' $draft >&2
    then
       echo "$prog: No MIME encoding -- lines above aren't mhbuild input" >&2
       exit 0
    else
       echo "$prog: invoking mhbuild" >&2
    fi
    ...

    (this of course means i can't use mhbuild directives in the same
    mail where the plaintext contains shell comments or C code.  hasn't
    ever been an issue, that i recall.)


=---------------------
 paul fox, address@hidden (arlington, ma, where it's 64.2 degrees)