On Wed, 30 Jul 2008 07:11:45 -0700, Phillip B Oldham wrote: > Most clients use ">" which is easy to check for, but I've seen some > which use "|" and some which *don't* quote at all. Its causing us > nightmares in parsing responses to system-generated emails. I was hoping > someone might've seen the problem previously and released some code.
My sympathies. I've even seen clients that prefix new (unquoted) text with the quote character ">". Well, possibly it's not the mail client, but the user. Who knows? I will sometimes quote text like this: [quote] Something quoted. [end quote] But I'm writing for a human audience, not for a program. The simple answer is that you can catch 90% of cases by checking for ">", and another 1% by checking for "|". If the email contains HTML, I have found that quoted text is sometimes in another colour. As for the rest, well, sometimes even human beings can't easily determine what's quoted and what isn't. Good luck getting a program to do it. (Percentages are plucked out of thin air. YMMV.) -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
