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Re: [PATCH] to improve the rendering of format=flowed quoted text



On 2004-01-11, Gary Johnson <garyjohn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 2004-01-11, Thomas Roessler <roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >> I don't see any problem with adding spaces to empty lines,
> > >> either--avoiding them hardly seems worth the added code
> > >> complexity, as trivial as it may be.
> > 
> > Actually, adding spaces to empty lines means that you replace a hard
> > line break by a soft one.  That's a bad thing to do.
> 
> You're right.  I had "space at the start of the line" stuck in my
> head and wasn't thinking that in this case, that's also a space at
> the end of the line.  I'll fix that.  Thanks.

I took another look at RFC 2646 before making the change, and I now
think the original patch is correct as it stands.  Section 4.4 says:

    On reception, if the first character of a line is a space, it is
    logically deleted.  This occurs after the test for a quoted
    line, and before the test for a flowed line.

Because any space-stuffing is removed before the test for a flowed
line, space-stuffing empty lines does _not_ replace a hard break by
a soft one.

Gary

-- 
Gary Johnson                               | Agilent Technologies
garyjohn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx                   | Wireless Division
http://www.spocom.com/users/gjohnson/mutt/ | Spokane, Washington, USA