Re: [Pan-devel] I need to check and/or request three features for Pan please, ASAP.

[Duncan]

SciFi posted on Wed, 30 Jul 2014 20:32:58 +0000 as excerpted:

> Request #1. — Alter the logic for Score/Flag filter rules to ignore the
> "alphabet soup".
> 
> We need to be able to specify a Regex type filter for the Subject line. 
> I know there's an option on the main Pan panel for Articles → Add a
> Scoring Rule… → Subject → matches regex → [fill it in here].  But does
> it work as the attached post for Forte Agent works?

[This reply is basically a high-detail confirmation of Andreas' reply.  
If you want the simple version, read his reply and skip the rest of this 
one.]

FWIW, pan's (slrn's) scorefile format is in fact native regex for the 
header-field lines, so editing the scorefile directly for that should 
work just fine and indeed, using the regex choice in the GUI should be 
fine as well, tho if you experience problems with it or for the more 
advanced stuff, it's always useful to be able to know how to directly 
edit the scorefile itself.

Pan's scoring GUI is primarily an attempt to simplify things, including 
allowing users who don't know regex access to at least the simplest and 
most common "straight text plus beginning and ending anchors" matching 
functionality of regex, and what pan puts in the scorefile is actually 
regex even for the other GUI options.

One useful exception to know about is the negation character, "~", that 
can prepend any keyword line (not the regex found after the keyword).

Also very useful is knowing that lines starting with % are comments.  In 
fact, most of the lines pan adds are actually comments and can be deleted 
or edited at will, without changing scorefile operation at all! =:^)

Slrn's scorefile documentation, which is what pan's format is based on:

http://slrn.sourceforge.net/docs/score.txt

Tho pan's format is different in at least three ways (with one being a 
bug:

1) Pan's regex matching is case insensitive

2) Pan lacks support for the advanced stuff such as include files and 
nesting (called grouping in the slrn document linked above).

3) Bug: Somewhere along the line pan's logical AND support (applying only 
if ALL conditions match, single colon after the Score keyword) seems to 
have broken, tho I seem to remember that it worked at some point in the 
past.  So now the logic is all OR-based (applying if ANY condition 
matches, should be two colons after the Score keyword, but it's treating 
a single colon that way now too).  So just write your scorefile for OR 
logic (see below) and always use TWO colons after the Score keyword, so 
if the bug is eventually fixed, you won't have to go thru and rewrite 
things.

Note that given a reasonably wide scoring space (to +/-9999 being watched/
ignored, but beyond that should work too) and incremental scoring, in 
most cases it should be possible to work around the lack of nesting and 
logical AND support by properly adjusting your incremental scoring rules 
to at least get the desired scoring /range/.

In case you'd find a real-world (but relatively simple) scorefile example 
useful, here's a link to an earlier posting of an abridged version of 
mine:

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.apps.pan.user/8689

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman