[Novalug] Extracting content of email

[Sean McGowan]

On Mon, 2009-02-09 at 01:43 -0500, Charles M Howe wrote:
> List,
> 
> I wish to the content of an email and discard the routing information. ,
> but maybe I worry two much. Maybe they are all ascii. I found my copy of
> "Learning vi", the lost it again immediately. Real soon now I am going
> to straiten it out and otherwise organize my life. 
  I know if I save an email it is ascii.  Type >file <file_name> and it will tell you.
Google learning vi.  There is a wealth of information on it.  If you are
only saving a handful of emails, bring it up in vi and type

:1,/^$/d

Broken down, the : lets you type a command
1,/^$/ says go from line 1 to the first line that matches this pattern
(this pattern is an empty line).  Look this up online for defs of
meta-characters.

d says delete.

Thus, if you find a better line  to chop it at, just replace the
pattern.  If you mess it up, just type 'u' (sans the qoutes to undo.)

> (1) How do I do this? I am almost certain that it can be be automated,
> and easily could already be done by a well-known program. Couldn't it be
> a bash script? Would writing such a script be an exercise for a CS
> class? Is it already that, i.e. a frequently asked class questions?
This could be done rather handily in a bash script (with sed and awk) or in a perl script.  I can write one later tonight, or tomorrow if no one else helps.

> (2) What text editor handles the output? vi would be preferable. What
> other editors put out information in a format that is native to vi?
???? I don't know what you mean.  Vi reads an ASCII file.  If there are special characters or markups, you will see them; but not wysiwyg style.

> (3) How can I change the size of vi text if I want to print an email
> message (bigger and smaller; type size settable.
I don't know this one.  Start here: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Learning_vi
You can also man vi.  You will learn this editor by using it.  It is
imperative to know, as it is on just about every system.  Plus it is
awesome.

> and in two related sets of questions (I think I have asked this before)
> 
> (4) Can I go from vi-recognize characters and OO word Processor to vi
> text?
> 
> and
> 
> (5) vice-versa.
Save As a text file in 00 and you will be fine.

Hope this helps,

Sean McGowan