ietf-nntp OVER and PAT

Clive D.W. Feather clive at demon.net
Tue Nov 21 02:51:06 PST 2000


Russ Allbery said:
> I am absolutely opposed to ever making \u match more than one character
> under any circumstances whatsoever.  I think that's a huge departure from
> what \u means in C and what \-escapes mean everywhere else, and I think
> that would be horribly confusing.

Agreed. [If the OVER database has already converted things to a single
space, that isn't a problem, of course.]

> I don't understand why you think there's such a strong need to match
> arbitrary whitespace.  Why is this such an important property?  Why can't
> the client use a number of \u sequences equal to the number of spaces that
> are present, provided that headers are unfolded using something like the
> DRUMS rules before the match takes place?

I think the concern was that the result isn't either predictable or
convenient for a client. For example, the following headers:

    Subject: Re: This is a test header

    Subject: Re: This is a
        test header

should be equivalent, and I want to write a single wildmat that matches
either. Personally I'd also like to be able to match:

    Subject: Re:  This is a test header

as well.

> Note
> that we certainly don't have any mechanism for matching arbitrary
> whitespace in a header right now, and I've not seen any huge cry for one.

Should we be prevented from looking ahead ?

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Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive at demon.net>   | Tel:  +44 20 8371 1138
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