Re: [nmh-workers] Handling empty components

[Ken Hornstein]

>Thanks guys for the quick reply and suggestions!
>
>Ken:  yeah, I can see how messy that's going to be; alas that
>%(trim) indeed doesn't return its result.  Although I'll probably
>see this again, it'd be maybe 1x/year for the next couple years.
>(And, who knows, maybe their IT department will fix it?  B-)  Not
>worth complicating my replcomps; easier to just manually add the
>"To:" field in vim.  B-)

I thought initially that %(trim) was recent, but no, it isn't ... it
existed back in MH 6.8, and I am kinda surprised that the authors of
%(trim) didn't make it return a value, because they actually knew the
format engine pretty well (it has a number of subtle bits of behavior
that I have only learned about after staring at the code for a while,
and I wrote fmttest(1) because it is so confusing).

We can't really change the behavior of %(trim), but we COULD easily add
a new function (maybe %(trimr) ?) that would return a value and be
easier for you to use in this case.  But it wouldn't appear until a
new nmh was released.

--Ken