On Mon, 22 Apr 2002 jpmg@??? wrote:
> I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but is there a good reason why
> newlines get mapped to ' ' within $message_body ? I can see why the
> remapping of nulls happens, but ...
The original motivation was so that people could search for phrases
without having to worry about whether there was a linebreak in the
phrase or not. Things like
if $message_body contains "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
This was in the very early days. Probably before I wrote PCRE and
understood as much about regular expressions as I do now. (Though not
everybody is clued up on regular expressions, of course.) And also
before I was paying much attention to attachments.
> As this behaviour makes certain filtering operations impossible, I was
> wondering if the (comparatively easy to implement) addition of another
> variable available to filters called $message_body_with_newlines would
> be a plausible thing to do?
It would probably be simpler (to explain and to implement) to have a
option called dont_turn_newlines_into_spaces_in_message_body (but I'd
try to find a shorter name).
Are there any other views on this?
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
