ietf-822
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Re: Revisiting RFC 2822 grammar (quoted-pair)

2004-01-16 00:44:08

Pete Resnick wrote:


On 1/15/04 at 7:09 PM +0100, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:

1. Bruce elimites obs-qp, even though it can match a few pairs quoted-pair cannot, such as "\" DEL.


Yup, I think that's Bruce's mistake.

and

On 1/15/04 at 9:59 PM +0000, Charles Lindsey wrote:
In <3FF7A5FC(_dot_)9080804(_at_)verizon(_dot_)net> 
blilly(_at_)verizon(_dot_)net writes:

quoted-pair     =       ("\" text)
[N.B. had redundant obs-qp alternative]


I think not. The obs version allows \NUL, \CR and \LF, which the regular version does not.
Right.


RFC 2822 gives quoted-pair as:

quoted-pair     =       ("\" text) / obs-qp

and text as:

text            =       %d1-9 /         ; Characters excluding CR and LF
                       %d11 /
                       %d12 /
                       %d14-127 /
                       obs-text

and obs-text (N.B. included in text) as:

obs-text        =       *LF *CR *(obs-char *LF *CR)

with obs-char defined as:

obs-char        =       %d0-9 / %d11 /          ; %d0-127 except CR and
                       %d12 / %d14-127         ;  LF

DEL is %d127, which is explicitly included in text and obs-char. Indeed, text explicitly includes every US-ASCII character by value except NUL, CR, and LF, and includes those as well via obs-text (explicitly permitting a single CR or LF) and obs-char (which includes NUL). I don't see any single US-ASCII character which quoted-pair doesn't permit after the backslash, without having to resort
to obs-qp.

Maybe that wasn't intended by RFC 2822, but there it is.

As an aside, note that obs-text may consist of multiple octets, so "\foo" could be considered a quoted-pair ("foo" matches obs-text via *(obs-char *LF *CR)). I believe that's a problem with 2822. On the other hand, 822 specifically mentioned the multi-character \CRLF and gave its semantics,
but 2822 doesn't seem to permit that.