comment on

I have been handling some email related process recently, mainly with processing information from the raw mail headers.

What I want to understand are: 1. how to map strings like these:

=?iso-8859-1?Q?Communiqu=E9?=
=?iso-8859-1?Q?Telef=F3nica?=
=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Montre=E1l?=
=?iso-8859-1?Q?Minist=E8re?=
[download]

to these:

Communique
Telefonica
Montreal
Ministere
[download]

I get the same, unhelpful (does not help me get the desired mappings above), results regardless of whether I use:

    use MIME::Words qw(:all);

    my $rawSub = $head->get( 'subject' );
    
    my $mailSubject = decode_mimewords( $rawSub );
[download]

or I use:

    use MIME::WordDecoder;

    my $wd = supported MIME::WordDecoder "US-ASCII";

    ### Decode a MIME string (e.g., into Latin1) via the default decod
+er:
    my $str = $wd->decode( $rawSub );
    
    print $str, "\n";
[download]

For some reason that I am unable to understand, the following fails completely (the output shows me the unknown character designator '_' for any character!):

    use MIME::WordDecoder;

    my $wd = new MIME::WordDecoder::US_ASCII;
    $wd->unknown( '_' ); # What to translate unknown characters to
    $wd->collapse( 1 ); # Collapse runs of unknown characters to a sin
+gle unknown
    
    print $wd->decode( $rawSub ), "\n";
[download]

2. How do I make Date::Manip::UnixDate completely ignore the timezone part of the date string?

Here is some code:

    use Date::Manip;
    Date_Init( "ConvTZ=IGNORE", "TZ=GMT" ); # We don't want time conve
+rsions happening. GMailBackup ignores timezone conformance and keeps 
+timestamps as they were
    
    # If using Date::Transform, you can use '%g' that is short for %a,
+ %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z - Fri, 28 Apr 1995 17:23:15 EDT; For eg : Sat, 
+9 Feb 2008 17:04:08 -0330
    $mailDate = UnixDate( $mailDate , '%Y_%m_%Q-%H%M%S' ); # 2008_02_2
+0080209-170408
[download]

For this example, consider the date string:

Sat, 9 Feb 2008 17:04:08 -0380

The timezone in the string is clearly bogus (minutes value > 60); yet this happens in "real life".

As evident from the code, I don't need the timezone information anyways. So how do I "lop it off" (is it recommended?) reliably?

I would rather have someone tell me a magic flag that I am unaware of that makes the UnixDate ignore the timezone as "chopping it off" promises to complicate life even more (time zones can be in different formats. Eg : EET, -330, +710, etc)

In reply to Transcoding MIME Strings by PoorLuzer

Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>
Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.


"be consistent"
	PerlMonks