[gmime-devel] Mapping MIME parts to byte offsets

[Alex Hudson <alex bongo-project org>]

Hi everyone,

Long time no see ;)

I've been trying to use GMime to get various byte offsets into a mail - 
for example, where the content body of a attachment starts, how big it 
is, that kind of thing.

To begin with, I had a look at how DBMail does it which (unless I'm 
following the code incorrectly) is something along the lines of using 
g_mime_parser_construct_message(), iterating over the various parts and 
doing some string building / seeking to work out the numbers. As well as 
not being terribly efficient, it also strikes me that this might 
potentially get the wrong answers because of the amount of regenerating 
data it seems to be doing.

I think really what I want is basically what the GMime parser is holding 
internally, in the BoundaryStack, and maybe some pointers into a part 
looking at where headers start / end. I imagine this could probably be 
done with a bit of judicious _tell() here and there in the code, but 
thinking about the patch I'm not really sure how it would fit in.

I was thinking that perhaps GMimeObject could be extended to have this 
information, but I'm also not sure if that's necessary - perhaps it 
could be done programatically. g_mime_object_to_string for example 
appears to create the string from the data stream, but again seems to be 
re-creating data I think?

Thoughts? :)

Cheers!

Alex.