Re: $head->get issues possibly.

At 4/5/2004 01:01 PM, Roderick A. Anderson wrote:
>It seems the spammers are breaking more and more Internet rules ... :-)

Generally, I think it would be useful to have Mail::Box be able to validate 
each of the major headers against these rules rather than to have users 
have to do it.  (E.g., if $msg->validFrom() ).  (Mark, how hard would this 
be to add?)

>   The problems is the get method on some messages is returning null
>values and this causes other code later in the scripts to fail.  The short
>questions is there a way to have the get methods to return at least an
>empty string?

For this purpose, where you don't really care if there is a header line or 
if it's blank because you're creating a report, I'd just use this kind of 
perl idiom:

my $from = $head->get('From') || '';

I wouldn't want Mail::Box to give me empty strings instead of undefined as 
a blank header line is valid.  There's really three (er, four) 
states.  Present with valid contents, present with invalid contents, 
present and empty, and not-present.  (With empty often just a subset of valid.)

David Golden