At 4/22/04 3:00 AM, dev-request@otrs.org wrote:

I'm going to test your patch on our production system.

I've actually done some more refinements since, after looking at the behavior of a number of "real" mail programs. For example, quoted lines beginning with ">" should not be rewrapped even if they exceed 80 characters. Rewrapping quoted lines almost always messes them up, and should be avoided. Also, a minimum line length of 4 characters before a wrap occurs should be enforced to prevent the problem where a line beginning with several spaces (for indenting) followed by a URL that exceeds 80 characters leads to two wrapped lines, the first containing three spaces and the second containing the URL.

Two questions anyway:

1. Did you fix the issue with original messages being wrapped at more than $NewLine characters? If I'm not wrong, Outlook's default is 80 characters.

I did some tests, and Outlook wraps at 76 characters or less, and no (non-broken) mail I could find exceeds 78. That leads to this regexp for quoting replies (the "78" should come from the config file, but you get the idea): $Data{Body} =~ s/(^>.+|.{4,78})(?:\s|\z)/$1\n/gm; That is, if the line is already quoted, don't wrap it at all. Otherwise, allow 4-78 characters before a space or newline; replace the last space or newline before 78 characters with a newline. The end result is that messages with a newline before 79 characters don't appear to get rewrapped (so they aren't altered if the user sent from a mail program that [correctly] did hard wrapping), but if they exceed 78 characters, they're rewrapped. (The above algorithm does not lead to perfect wrapping for some types of less common mail formatting that doesn't use hard returns, such as that described in RFC 2646, but it is better than what's there now.) (The "\z" makes sure that the last line is not broken at the final space in the string if there is no trailing newline.) The regexp for wrapping our own outgoing text (not quoting someone a user's message) is the same, but should use a different maximum length (again, the "72" should be adjustable from the config file): $Self->{Body} =~ s/(^>.+|.{4,72})(?:\s|\z)/$1\n/gm; I prefer 72 characters max to 75, because it gives you more room to have several levels of quoted replies, which are common in support environments. You certainly don't want to use 78, because Outlook would then rewrap it at 76 when the user replied, leading to a mess. So, in a nutshell: 1. Don't rewrap quoted text at all. It almost never makes it better. 2. When quoting and rewrapping text from someone else, don't wrap at less than 78 characters, because the user's mail program may have used lines that long, and rewrapping them at less than 78 characters leads to the problem where each line is converted to two lines, with the last word of each sentence on a line by itself. 3. When rewrapping text you created that isn't already hard-wrapped, make sure the lines don't exceed 76 characters. Otherwise, people replying to you will rewrap your message in the same way described above.

2. How do your regexp'es handle long URLs? They shouldn't wrap lines containing a single word (actually, they shouldn't wrap words at all).

They never break words -- they only break on whitespace. If you have a long URL, it won't be broken at all.

Anyway, I think that good message wrapping should be integrated in OTRS as soon as possible.

If Martin gives the go-ahead to indicate that a patch would be accepted, I'll work up a proper patch that removes all the hard-wrapping stuff and properly wraps all the OTRS textareas (I'm currently just doing AgentCompose). -- Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies http://www.tigertech.net/ "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." -- Darwin