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

[Dave Euser <dave_euser yahoo com>]

On Thu, 2001-11-15 at 17:16, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> On Thu, 2001-11-15 at 16:53, Dave Euser wrote:
> > Just a few thoughts on this:
> > You could assume that any characters marking a quotation will be non
> > alphanumeric (makes some things simpler). 
> > But this brings up other issues:
> >     1) how to recognize a single line being quoted (ie the original
> >     message has only one line). I would assume that you would have  to have
> > 2+ lines to make a valid assumption that the character(s)   you're
> > looking at are a quotation marker, and not actually part of         the text
> >     2) what happens if the original message has some kind of list:
> >     eg      - item 1
> >             - item 2
> >             - item 3
> >     This could easily be interpreted as a quotation marker. How to
> >     distinguish?
>
> You can't make the assumption that the quote marker will be
> non-alphanumeric. Emacs, for example has this nasty habbit of quoting
> with, for example:
>
> Euser> this is quoting what Dave Euser said.
>
> That contains alpha-numeric characters.

Interesting......I try to leave emacs to coding. Anything more drives me
a little nuts. (no beer and all screwed up key-bindings makes Dave go
crazy....don't mind if I do!)

> > Definitely not a simple problem....it might come to the point of
> >     a) not doing anything at all....leave things as-is
> >     b) make certain assumptions, causing some mis-quoted messages
>
> This is what we currently do
>
> >     c) create a list of standard quotation markers and work from    that list
>
> There is only 1 standard way, and that is "> " which is also specified
> by an internet standards draft.

I guess there's no real way to change the current functionality without
having a change to the RFC for email communications that includes a
header for the quotation marker. I haven't really had a problem with
misquoted messages yet - guess I should have just read the code first to
figure out what's going on.

> Jeff

BTW, kudos to all the ximian hackers for the great job on evo....I've
been really impressed with the progress you've made. Amazing piece of
software.