ietf-nntp OVER and PAT
Clive D.W. Feather
clive at demon.net
Wed Nov 22 03:07:00 PST 2000
Russ Allbery said:
>> 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,
>
> Why do you feel that those to headers should be equivalent? DRUMS
> explicitly says that they're not.
Because I misremembered the folding rules.
> *Ideally*, I'd like to use exactly the above definition of unfolding for
> overview data and then additionally convert any tab to a space and
> otherwise not make any changes to the header (headers containing lone NUL,
> CR, or LF should really be rejected, but if we want to be complete, we
> could say that those three characters are also replaced with space if
> present). I think we should be able to preserve all the other control
> characters.
I don't have the experience to argue one way or another about this, but see
below.
>> 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.
>
> I think we're getting towards regular expressions here, honestly. Maybe
> PAT is an inherently bad idea and what we really want to do is standardize
> XHDR and introduce a separate command that uses regexes. Bleh.
The client can always do further filtering on the results, perhaps with
full regexes, so I don't see much need for them in the server.
However, white space *is* something that gets munged a lot in practice,
whether or not we approve of this. At present I have no way to pick out
headers containing consecutive words *allowing for white space hassles*
other than "consecutive*word" or "consecutive\u0040*word", which isn't
really what I need. I think that a \s matching white space sequences is a
reasonable addition.
--
Clive D.W. Feather | Work: <clive at demon.net> | Tel: +44 20 8371 1138
Internet Expert | Home: <clive at davros.org> | Fax: +44 20 8371 1037
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