Re: [Pan-users] Composing regex for Pan

[John Aldrich]

On Monday 08 March 2004 02:42 pm, Michael R. McCarrey wrote:
> I tried sending this on Saturday, but it never appeared on the list. I
> apologise for resending it, should it pop up later.
> ------------------------
> Hi All,
>
> I'm using Pan 0.14.2 on Linux.
>
> I've been pulling my hair out (what little of it remains, that is),
> trying to construct a regex mainly to filter out subjects that contain
> all caps, as in: "HAVE EVERYTHING NOW!" amd "MAKE YOUR WILLY BIGGER
> TODAY", as well as things like "*** GET IT NOW ***" and "$$$$ MAKE MORE
> mOney ToDaY $$$$$".
>
> I've waded through the source tree and docs, looking for something to
> explain how to construct a regex that will match strings like those, but
> to no avail. My programming experience is limited to BASIC and Assembly,
> so anything in C, much more involved than the K&R's "hello world" looks
> like someone was very angry with the alphabet. A Python is a large
> aquatic snake and women wear perls around their necks (which might be
> most of the problem).
>
> Earlier in the list, someone commented that Pan's regex parsing was case
> insensitive (and had to be enabled manually - "how" was not mentioned),
> which explains, I think, why [A-Z] [^a-z] makes everything disappear.
>
> I installed the regex coach awhile back to help me do this, but what
> seems to work with it, either does nothing in Pan, or eliminates
> everything.
>
> The web is a wasteland of things that work for everyone else, too.
>
> I'm still working on it, but any suggestions would be most appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
Yeah... you know, what would REALLY be helpful would be if there were a way to 
just right-click on a subject and say "create a filter from this" and have a 
wizard pop up asking, say "do you want to WATCH for this message or IGNORE 
this subject" and similarly for clicking on an email address, i.e. "do you 
want to WATCH for messages from this person or IGNORE messages from this 
person" and then possibly have a checkbox for "watch/ignore complete threads" 
etc.

'Course, I know it would help if I could write a patch, but the only 
programming I've done was years ago and was in line-number basic or in 
RPG-II, neither of which was very advanced or useful here. :-)

I think having a wizard sort of thing would make PAN's filtering much more 
useable by the general population of internet users and thus make PAN more 
useable by the general public. Guess it's time to file a Bugzilla report. :-)