Re: [Evolution] Recognizing Arbitrary Message Quotations (was Re: [Evolution]

[Brett Johnson <brett_johnson hp com>]

On Thu, 2001-11-15 at 11:50, NotZed wrote:
> Or, we could just use '> ' like most everyone else, and the problem
> isn't there.

?? I don't see how this makes the problem go away.  Just because
Evolution decides to use '> ' for quoting doesn't mean that every other
mail client in the world will suddenly fall into line.  So, we still
need a way to recognize quoted text that doesn't conform to the '> '
convention.


Jim Meyer wrote:
> > It appears that an poorly worded query on my part spawned an interesting
> > topic: how can we recognize arbitrarily quoted messages for purposes of
> > colorization, requoting, and rewrapping?

Personally, I'm partial to the regexp solution (this shouldn't be a
surprise ;o).  Simply use a regular expression to describe the various
ways that a string can be quoted.  Every line that matches said regular
expression is considered to be an attribution.  This works very well in
my experience (using Balsa and VM under XEmacs).  It's even a fairly
simple process to recognize different levels of quotation (simply remove
the first part of the line that matched the regexp, then try the match
again - recurse until it doesn't match anymore).

> > It feels like a potentially worthwhile approach is to spend some time
> > trying to recognize attribution strings; if we could learn to do that,
> > we can infer that the next line is quoted somehow, and start to unravel
> > which quoting strings relate to which attributions. 

Wow, that's ambitious.  Seems like it could easily be broken as well.  Take
this message for example:  NotZed's reply to your message didn't contain an
attribution at all, so I added one.  How would you distinguish between
NotZed's comments and your own, if I hadn't added the attribution?  For
that matter, how do you distinguish between them now?

> > Ideally, we could completely unroll any number of arbitrarily quoted
> > messages, which would allow us to then requote or rewrap tidily.
> >
> > However, this is no more easy than the first problem, and perhaps
> > considerably harder. I'm thinking about this a bit in my spare moments,
> > but to paraphrase ESR, many eyes make light work. ;]

Cheers!
-- 
Brett Johnson <brett_johnson hp com>
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