101–110 of 200 posts
I wrote my own email archiving software. The hardest part was dealing with all the weird edge cases in my 20+ year collection of .eml files. For being so simple conceptually, email is surprisingly complicated.
It never got too popular, but I had users for a few years and I can honestly say MIME was the bane of my life for most of those years.
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The regex answer is from the very old days of Stackoverflow, before fun was banned. I agree it barely qualifies as answer, but considering that the question has over 4 million page views (which almost puts it in the top 100 most viewed questions all-time), it has reached a lot people. The answer probably had much more influence than any serious answer on that topic. So I'd say the author did a good job.
Of all the things I wrote on SO, including many actually-useful detailed explanations, it was this drunken rant that stuck, for some reason.
I know it's a hassle for a platform to moderate good rants from bad ones, and I decry SO from pushing too hard against these. I truly believe that our industry would benefit from more drunken technical rants.
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This is how email work(ed) over smtp. When each command was sent it would get a '200'-class message (success) or 400/500-class message (failure). Sound familiar? telnet smtp.mailserver.com 25 HELO MAIL FROM: me@foo.com RCPT TO: you@bar.com DATA blah blah blah how's it going? talk to you later! . QUIT
This brings back some fun memories from the 1990s when this was exactly how we would send prank emails.
> So what’s happened here? Well, whoever collected these emails first converted from CRLF (i.e., “Windows” line ending coding) to “NL” (i.e., “Unix” line ending coding). This is pretty normal if you want to deal with email. But you then have one byte fewer: I think there is a second possible conclusion, which is that the transformation happened historically. Everyone assumes these emails are an exact dump from Gmail,…
Great. Can't wait for equal signs to be the next (((whatever this is))). Maybe it's a secret code. j/k On a side note: There are actually products marketed as kosher bacon (it's usually beef or turkey). And secular Jews frequently make jokes like this about our kosher bros who aren't allowed to eat the real stuff for some dumb reason like it has too many toes.
That said, there is a _possibly_ kosher pig: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babirusa#Relationship_with_hum...
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If you want it to be the only copy and not sync with anything POP3 is line–based too, anyway. Maybe you can rsync your maildir?
I just read it mainly in one place and through the web interface when I have to.
The most interesting thing to me wasn't the equals signs, which I knew are from quoted-printable, but the fact that when an equals sign appears, a letter that should have been preceding or following it is missing. It's as if an off-by-one error has occurred, where instead of getting rid of the equals sign, it's gotten rid of part of the actual text. Perhaps the CRLF/LF thing is part of it.
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I know this is grumpy but this I’ve never liked this answer. It is a perfect encapsulation of the elitism in the SO community—if you’re new, your questions are closed and your answers are edited and downvoted. Meanwhile this is tolerated only because it’s posted by a member with high rep and username recognition.
As someone who used to write custom crawlers 20 years ago, I can confirm that regular expressions worked great. All my crawlers were custom designed for a page and the sites were mostly generated by some CMS and had consistent HTML. I don't remember having to do much bug fixes that were related to regular expression issues. I don't suggest writing generic HTML parsers that works with any site, but for custom crawlers…
A scraper is already resigned to being brittle and weird. You’re relying not only on the syntax of the data, but an implicit structure beyond that. This structure is unspecified and may change without notice, so whatever robustness you can achieve will come from being loose with what you accept and trying to guess what changes might be made on the other end. Regex is a decent tool for that.