Re: [Nmh-workers] Request for new command: addresses

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi,

Paul wrote:
> i'm not convinced that piping "yes n" to a clearly interactive command
> turns it into a "scriptable interface".  it's more akin to screen
> scraping.  there's no particular reason for "Reply to address?" to
> change any time soon, but also no reason for us to promise that it
> won't.  if the feature is important enough to lock down the UI, then
> it's probably enough to do correctly.

I agree.  Also, I've noticed a problem with the sed command as given,

    s/\<Reply to ([^?]+)\? /\1\n/g

since addresses can contain question marks, e.g.
=?utf-8?Q?Go=20Newsletter?= <address@hidden>

repl(1) gaining a -listaddr might seem easiest.

It seems to me that a suitable mh-format(5) file for repl's -form could
get close to listing just the addresses from the various fields.  Or an
mhl(1) file for repl's -filter.  I'm hoping a narrow width, e.g. 1,
would cause one address per line.  And the addresses could be decoded.
Come to that, ditch repl.  If mh-format's language isn't quite up to it
then it suggests it still needs to evolve until it has that embedded
LISP interpreter.  :-)

Another solution would be a canonical mail-export format made for easy
parsing, e.g. directory structure with headers in a text file, UTF-8
throughout, no encoding, no line-length limitation, one address per
line, ...

Cheers, Ralph.