ietf-mta-filters
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: Stripping leading/trailing spaces in relational draft

2005-10-12 07:33:49

Michael Haardt wrote:
  header "subject" "abc"
  header "subject" " abc"

yield with different implementations on matching

  Subject:abc
  Subject: abc
  Subject:  abc

? My implementation evaluates the first test to be true, and the second
to false for all subjects.  Trailing white space is kept and used,
because that was intuitive to me

It's intuitive to you that a message with this line
  Subject: banana
should NOT match this test
  header :is "subject" "banana"
?
What, you didn't notice the space character after the word "banana" in the subject line? Neither did anyone else.

Repeating: I'm saying that I can imagine NO real situation where it matters, I can imagine NO ONE really wanting it to work that way, and I can imagine a LOT of wasted time trying to figure out why a script behaved in an unexpected way on a message. I also expect that there are implementations of mail thingies out there (clients, servers, relays, whatever) that would strip that trailing blank from the header anyway, so I doubt such a thing could be transmitted reliably even if someone DID want to.

I'll believe that there are "IETF process" reasons why we can't change this now. It'll be tough to get me to believe that anyone actively WANTS (for a reason better than "What if...?") the preservation of trailing white space in these comparisons.

Barry

--
Barry Leiba, Pervasive Computing Technology  
(leiba(_at_)watson(_dot_)ibm(_dot_)com)
http://www.research.ibm.com/people/l/leiba
http://www.research.ibm.com/spam

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>