File: deuglify.el.html

This file enables Gnus to repair broken citations produced by common user agents like MS Outlook (Express). It may repair articles of other user agents too.

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Outlook sometimes wraps cited lines before sending a message as seen in this example:

Example #1
----------

John Doe wrote:

> This sentence no verb. This sentence no verb. This sentence
no
> verb. This sentence no verb. This sentence no verb. This
> sentence no verb.

The function gnus-article-outlook-unwrap-lines tries to recognize those erroneously wrapped lines and will unwrap them. I.e. putting the wrapped parts ("no" in this example) back where they belong (at the end of the cited line above).

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Note that some people not only use broken user agents but also practice a bad citation style by omitting blank lines between the cited text and their own text.
;:
Example #2
----------

John Doe wrote:

> This sentence no verb. This sentence no verb. This sentence no
You forgot in all your sentences.
> verb. This sentence no verb. This sentence no verb. This
> sentence no verb.

Unwrapping "You forgot in all your sentences." would be invalid as this part wasn't intended to be cited text. gnus-article-outlook-unwrap-lines will only unwrap lines if the resulting citation line will be of a certain maximum length. You can control this by adjusting gnus-outlook-deuglify-unwrap-max. Also unwrapping will only be done if the line above the (possibly) wrapped line has a minimum length of gnus-outlook-deuglify-unwrap-min.

Furthermore no unwrapping will be undertaken if the last character is one of the chars specified in gnus-outlook-deuglify-unwrap-stop-chars. Setting this to ".?!" inhibits unwrapping if the cited line ends with a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark. Note that this variable defaults to nil, triggering a few false positives but generally giving you better results.

Unwrapping works on every level of citation. Thus you will be able repair broken citations of broken user agents citing broken citations of broken user agents citing broken citations...

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Citations are commonly introduced with an attribution line indicating who wrote the cited text. Outlook adds superfluous information that can be found in the header of the message to this line and often wraps it.

If that weren't enough, lots of people write their own text above the cited text and cite the complete original article below.

Example #3
----------

Hey, John. There's no in all your sentences!

John Doe <john.doe@some.domain> wrote in message news:a87usw8$dklsssa$2@some.news.server...
> This sentence no verb. This sentence no verb. This sentence
no
> verb. This sentence no verb. This sentence no verb. This
> sentence no verb.
>
> Bye, John

Repairing the attribution line will be done by function gnus-article-outlook-repair-attribution which calls other function that try to recognize and repair broken attribution lines. See variable gnus-outlook-deuglify-attrib-cut-regexp for stuff that should be cut off from the beginning of an attribution line and variable gnus-outlook-deuglify-attrib-verb-regexp for the verbs that are required to be found in an attribution line. These function return the point where the repaired attribution line starts.

Rearranging the article so that the cited text appears above the new text will be done by function gnus-article-outlook-rearrange-citation. This function calls gnus-article-outlook-repair-attribution to find and repair an attribution line.

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Well, and that's what the message will look like after applying deuglification:

Example #3 (deuglified)
-----------------------

John Doe <john.doe@some.domain> wrote:

> This sentence no verb. This sentence no verb. This sentence no
> verb. This sentence no verb. This sentence no verb. This
> sentence no verb.
>
> Bye, John

Hey, John. There's no in all your sentences!

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Usage
-----

Press W k in the Summary Buffer.

Non recommended usage :-)
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To automatically invoke deuglification on every article you read, put something like that in your .gnus:

(add-hook 'gnus-article-decode-hook #'gnus-article-outlook-unwrap-lines)

or _one_ of the following lines:

;; repair broken attribution lines
(add-hook 'gnus-article-decode-hook #'gnus-article-outlook-repair-attribution)

;; repair broken attribution lines and citations
(add-hook 'gnus-article-decode-hook #'gnus-article-outlook-rearrange-citation)

Note that there always may be some false positives, so I suggest using the manual invocation. After deuglification you may want to refill the whole article using W w.

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Limitations
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As I said before there may (or will) be a few false positives on unwrapping cited lines with gnus-article-outlook-unwrap-lines.

gnus-article-outlook-repair-attribution will only fix the first attribution line found in the article. Furthermore it fixed to certain kinds of attributions. And there may be horribly many false positives, vanishing lines and so on -- so don't trust your eyes. Again I recommend manual invocation.

gnus-article-outlook-rearrange-citation carries all the limitations of gnus-article-outlook-repair-attribution.

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See commit log for other changes.

Revision 1.5 2002/01/27 14:39:17 rscholz
* New variable gnus-outlook-deuglify-no-wrap-chars to inhibit
  unwrapping if one these chars is first in the possibly wrapped line.
* Improved rearranging of the article.
* New function gnus-outlook-repair-attribution-block for repairing
  those big "Original Message (following some headers)" attributions.

Revision 1.4 2002/01/03 14:05:00 rscholz
Renamed gnus-outlook-deuglify-article to gnus-article-outlook-deuglify-article. Made it easier to deuglify the article while being in Gnus' Article Edit Mode. (suggested by Phil Nitschke)

Revision 1.3 2002/01/02 23:35:54 rscholz
Fix a bug that caused succeeding long attribution lines to be unwrapped. Minor doc fixes and regular expression tuning.

Revision 1.2 2001/12/30 20:14:34 rscholz
Clean up source.

Revision 1.1 2001/12/30 20:13:32 rscholz
Initial revision

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Defined variables (10)

Defined functions (10)

Defined faces (0)