[ILUG] auto mail reformat

[Padraig Brady]

Gavin McCullagh wrote:
> 
> Surely this is not *reliably* possible?
> 
> ie if you have 
> 
> 
>> > little
>>
> 
> isn't just another person commenting later in the thread?
> 
> Obviously you could get a line which appears in between two lines of the
> same thread and merge it in (no matter how compilcated the implementation).  
> Is that what you want though?  It could really bugger up some complex threads 
> on you.
> 
> Gavin

I suppose you can't do this generally,
the best you could do is select lines
manually that you know are from the
same response and pass this through a filter
giving the number of >> to prepend and the
total width of the text. There is then the
issue of valid > being removed from the text,
but I could live with that.

How about the following:

#!/bin/sh

if [ $# != 2 ]; then
     echo "Usage: $0 reponse_level(starting at 0) line_width"
     exit
fi

RESPONSE_LEVEL=$1
TEXT_WIDTH=`expr $2 - $1 \* 2`

curr_level=0
while [ 1 ];do
     if [ $curr_level -eq $RESPONSE_LEVEL ]; then
         break;
     fi

     RESPONSE_DELIM="$RESPONSE_DELIM> "

     curr_level=`expr $curr_level + 1`
done

tr -ds '>\n' ' ' | fmt -w$TEXT_WIDTH | sed -e "s/^[ 
]*\(.*\)/$RESPONSE_DELIM\1/"