Re: editing Subject: lines

[Peter Bloomfield <PeterBloomfield bellsouth net>]

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Hi Jack,

On 09/18/2017 10:48:14 AM Mon, Jack wrote:
> Motivation:  I have a mailing list I follow, where I collect all of the emails about bugs.  Most of there are 
> to the list from the relevant bugzilla, but some are just messages to the list.  Because they don't all come 
> from the same system, no threading system can properly group them all.  I've managed to make a copy of the 
> maildir folder, and use sed to always put [Bug 67897954] before anything else in the subject like, Re:, Fw:, 
> [listname], but there are some messages sed doesn't touch.  The biggest bunch of these are where the subject 
> been encoded, for example:
>
> Subject:
>  =?UTF-8?B?W2tteW1vbmV5NF0gW0J1ZyAzMDY2OTJdIExhIGZlbsOqdHJlIGVzdCBwbHVz?=
>  =?UTF-8?B?IGxhcmdlIHF1ZSBsJ8OpY3Jhbg==?=
>
> Enough googling has now given me both perl and python routines to decode these, and I suppose I can use Perl 
> instead of sed to do all the editing.  However, I'm also open to other suggestions on how to approach this.  
> I can easily identify the specific files with this issue.  Some of the Subjects start on the same line, and 
> some wrap as in the above example.  I'm not certain, but I think most of the UTF encoded subjects don't 
> actually have any non-ascii characters, although a few certainly do.  I suppose I could replace all those 
> lines to only UTF-8 encode those characters which need it instead of the whole line, and then my original 
> approach to a regex replacement would work.

The simplest approach seems to be to decode the content of each encoded word, convert to UTF-8 if it isn't 
that already, and use whatever tool is most convenient to grep out the bug number or whatever else you need. 
You shouldn't need to RFC-2047-encode anything. Could that work?

Peter
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