Re: Followup on egrep regex problem...

On Sun, Mar 07, 2010 at 11:50:19PM -0500, Mike Devour wrote:
> Here is a solution I've come up with which *SEEMS* to work:
> 
> :0 fhw
>  * ^content-type:(.*\<)?multipart.*\<(boundary=\/[^"; ]+|
> boundary="\/[^"; ]+)
>   {
>      TESTVAR = $MATCH
>   }

As I recall, you wanted to lose the quote marks in the match; 
why not simply use a regex like:

  * ... boundary="*\/[^"; ]+

In the simple tests I just ran, this extracts the boundary string,
minus double quote chars, if present.  Do you have examples of
boundary strings for which this regex fails? 


> ... it would make the most sense to match anything except
> double-quote, semi-colon, or whitespace, except that we don't seem
> to be allowed to use control characters, POSIX character classes or
> shortcuts ( e.g.: [:space:] or \s ) inside bracket expressions in
> procmail? This seems to be impossible to do:
> 
> [^";<something that stands for all whitespace characters>]
> 
> I wish I could understand why?
> 
> Cary, you say that procmail doesn't allow escaping of control
> characters. Does that mean things like \f \n \r \n \t \v will not be
> understood in any context? Or just inside bracket expressions? Can you
> or anyone point me to where that's documented, please?

man procmailrc, in the MISCELLANEOUS section says:

  The regular expression engine built into procmail does not support
  named character classes.

I don't see any explicit mention of the \f... syntax but I don't
think it's allowed.  What's wrong with matching "anything except
double-quote, semi-colon, or whitespace" with [^";XXX] where "XXX"
is your favorite set of space, tab, ^M, etc.?

Jim