mhonarc-users

Re: Use of EXCS (was private: MHonArc patch (addition))

1998-06-21 11:22:24
On June 19, 1998 at 15:02, Geoff Wing wrote:

:<EXCS>
:x-(?!this-header|another-header)
:</EXCS>
:
:I have not tested it, but it utilizes Perl's negative look-ahead
:assertion.  Hence, the regex should match any header starting with
:"x-" but not followed by "this-header" or "another-header".

That requires that anyone doing anything out of the ordinary in this area
brush up on perl's extensions to regexp's.

Knowing something about Perl's regexes is something a user needs when
doing anything more complicated.  Look at the SUBJECTARTICLERXP and
SUBJECTREPLYRXP resources.  And with the new SUBJECTSTRIPCODE that
will part of v2.3, it is a must if user want to preprocess message
subjects.

The above solution is fairly straight-forward, and does not even
require the user to understand how it really works to duplicate it for
there own needs (which I venture is a very rare need since no one else
said anything in the past about trying to get such desired behavior).

It could be useful if above method was mentioned in the documentation.

I would suggest having a symmetry
of <EXCS> ... </EXCS>  and <EXCS KEEP> ... </EXCS> (or some such) where
those defined in keep are matched earlier (as in the patch I sent Earl but
probably noone else has seen).

The patch was not complete.  If I remember correctly, it did not
deal with the changes needed in mhrcfile.pl and mhdb.pl.  Ie. The
patch only dealt with the internal hash which would require users to
edit the code to directly to utilize it.

Note, if such a feature were added, I would favor something like
<KEEP> since <EXCS KEEP> is contradictory and would require extra
changes to mhrcfile.pl.

Personally, I now try to avoid adding new resources when it is not
necessary.  Since there are so many already, new ones added should only
be done if there is not an adequate solution with existing ones to
solve a given problem.  Currently (based on my in-progress version for
2.3), there are 172 resources.  I think it is more of a challenge for
a user to get a hold on the numerous resources verses dealing with
learning some straight-forward techniques with Perl regexes (plus,
learning something about regexes may provide benefit in other
MHonArc, and non-MHonArc, tasks).

If the user is stumped, fellow users on the list will normally provide
an answer to such problems.

        --ewh

----
             Earl Hood              | University of California: Irvine
      ehood(_at_)medusa(_dot_)acs(_dot_)uci(_dot_)edu      |      Electronic 
Loiterer
http://www.oac.uci.edu/indiv/ehood/ | Dabbler of SGML/WWW/Perl/MIME

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