Re: getting text of message as resource variable

[Earl Hood <earl@earlhood.com>]

On May 21, 2002 at 21:51, Greg Matheson wrote:

> At the start of May, Earl Hood wrote in reply to me:
> 
> > > I guess I could parse the email messages myself and pass the
> > > bodies in as environmental variables to MHonArc. This solution
> > > still would have the problem of deciding which email message
> > > corresponded with which MHonArc file name.
> 
> > .... I recommended leveraging the annotation feature to get the
> > desired effect.  I.e. Pre-create an annotation for each message
> > including the first few lines of a message and then use the
> > $NOTE$ resource variable to include it in the index.
> 
> This turned out cleaner than I expected using the Mail::Box
> modules, but I imagine the MIME::* suite allow the same sort of
> thing.
...

You may want to look at recent post I did to the list containing
the program mha-preview.  It is a custom front-end to MHonArc that
supports including the initial text of a message body in indexes.
The program mainly exists to illustrate the MHonArc callback API.

Since others have been asking about including body data within indexes,
I decided to make a stab at it myself without relying on some external
pre-processing and to see if the callback API I have been adding can
actually be used to do something useful.  mha-preview will only work
with v2.5.4 or later.

In the next release, I will include mha-preview in the examples/
directory.  I may, in the future, include such functionality within
MHonArc itself since it should be easy to conditional the functionality
so the overhead in doing it is only done if enabled.

NOTE: If the functionality is added to MHonArc, it will probably not
be compatible with mha-preview.  However, the functionality would
be independent, so mha-preview, if used, can still be used with
later releases and anything add to MHonArc can be ignored.

> I get the body of the message and its id and URL-escape it and
> pass it to MHonArc. I use the resource variable, $NOTE$ in my rcfile to
> put the annotation in the right URL. The only thing I don't like
> is having to URL escape the string myself, but there doesn't seem
> to be any MHonArc resource that will do it for me. 

What is the URL escaping used for?  Are you placing the body text
within a URL?  Wouldn't that make a large URL?

You can try "$NOTE:U$ to get MHonArc to URL encode the text for you.
The Resource Variables section of the docs list the variable modifiers
you can use.

> The other thing I don't like is the MIME garbage left in the body
> after decoding, but I can't expect MHonArc to do that for me :-)

The mha-preview program avoids this problem by extracting the
body preview text from the converted HTML and not from the raw
mail data.

--ewh