NAME

News::Article::Response - create responses to News::Articles

SYNOPSIS

  use News::Article::Response;

  my $newart = News::Article->response($oldart, 
                { 'From' => 'Random User <random@user.org.invalid>' },
                'prefix' => 'random.', 'colwrap' => 80, 'nodate' => 1 );

  use News::Article::Response qw( quotewrap );

  my @wrappedtext = quotewrap( 80, '> ', 'overflow', @text );

DESCRIPTION

News::Article::Response is a set of additional functions for News::Article to create responses to previous articles.

USAGE

Functions

response ( ARTICLE, HEADERS, ARGUMENTS )

Creates a new article that's in response to ARTICLE - that is, with headers based on the original ARTICLE. Base headers that are created should be Message-ID, Date, Newsgroups, References, and Subject; more headers will be added as given in the hash reference HEADERS. The body of the message is a quoted version of the original message with the signature trimmed off.

ARGUMENTS, a hash, allows for user-modifed behavior. Arguments that we listen to:

  prefix            Message-ID prefix (see News::Article)
  domain            Message-ID domain (see News::Article)
  nomessageid       Don't actually add a Message-ID: header

  time              Time to base Date: off (defaults to local time)
  nodate            Don't actually add a Date: header

  ignore_followups  Ignore the Followup-To: header when deciding 
                    what groups to respond to.  Especially important
                    if the original line was 'poster', as we return 
                    with 'undef' in that case (we should be sending 
                    an email)
  newsgroups        Newsgroups to respond to, ignoring both the old 
                    Newsgroups: and Followup-To: headers.

  keepsig           Keep the signature for quoting.
  quotechar         The quote method; defaults to '> ', for use 
                    with wrap().
  colwrap           Columns to wrap at, for use with wrap().
  wraptype          Wrapping type, for use with wrap().
  respstring        A code reference that takes as input the old 
                    article, and generates a string of the sort 
                    "Tim Skirvin writes:" for the start of the 
                    body.  The default gets the information out of 
                    From: or Reply-To:, or failing that uses uses
                    '(unknown)'.  Doesn't get added if there's no 
                    quoted material.  
    

Returns 'undef' on failure (not enough arguments, followups were set to poster so there shouldn't be an article anyway), otherwise returns a News::Article object.

quotewrap ( COLUMNS, QUOTECHAR, WRAPTYPE, TEXT )

Adds QUOTECHAR to the start of each line of text from TEXT, and then wraps the text at COLUMNS columns where necessary. This differs from Text::Wrap in that lines that don't need to be wrapped won't be; that is, we keep as much of the original formatting as possible.

If COLUMNS is less than 0, then don't actually do the wrapping.

WRAPTYPE is currently ignored. It probably won't be forever. Offer it the same values as in Text::Wrap.

This function can be imported by other programs, but is not by default (@EXPORT_OK).

REQUIREMENTS

News::Article, Exporter, and of course Perl (probably a fairly modern version at that).

SEE ALSO

News::Article, News::Web

NOTES

This was originally written to work with my News::Web project (which I plan to release), and much of the code was from old News::Verimod (which I may not release). It's now part of my newslib project (which *is* released: http://www.killfile.org/~tskirvin/software/newslib/). It should be fairly general-purpose, but we'll see.

TODO

It would be nice if quotewrap() were to reformat paragraphs into something reasonable when they're quoted; we'll see if it's something worth doing.

Get rid of the dependency on Text::Wrap, since we're not actually using it except in an internal function that doesn't get called.

AUTHOR

Tim Skirvin <tskirvin@killfile.org>

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2003 by Tim Skirvin <tskirvin@killfile.org>. This code may be distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.