Author: Dean Brooks Date: To: exim-users Subject: Re: [Exim] newlines in $message_body
> 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"
>
> 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?
We definitely have many scripts that depend upon the existing
behavior. Introducing line feeds would definitely make searching more
difficult as regexps would be required for almost every single search
at that point. Requiring regexp's can be unnecessarily complicated
for setting up a large numberof simple searches.
An alternative question - why would someone want to keep the linefeeds
in $message_body? I'm sure there are legitimate needs but wasn't sure
what they would be...
