Bug#139891: ITP: dehtml -- provide a text/plain translation for text/html messages
Package: wnpp
Version: N/A; reported 2002-03-25
Severity: wishlist
* Package name : dehtml
Version : 0.1
Upstream Author : Chris Lawrence <lawrencc@debian.org>
* License : GPL
Description : provide a text/plain translation for text/html messages
(Off-the-cuff description, probably will be changed ;-)
Some ignorant users (*cough* usually using Hotmail *cough*) send
messages via the Internet that only include HTML formatted text.
While some of us in the universe don't have to deal with these users,
and others can deal with them in the style of Overfiend, in a few
professions (like non-tenured faculty member at a state university
where the students have better political connections than you do) it
is more important to be able to read these messages in a decent free
mailer than it is to reeducate users BOFH-style.
Enter "dehtml". It takes a text/html message and builds a new
multipart/alternative message with the HTML and text versions of the
message, retaining the original header information.
Unlike using mailcap entries, this allows you to treat the message
like any normal text/plain message in MIME-aware mailers, including
drafting replies with quoted text. Unlike a simple-minded filter
through html2text, which would otherwise work, it retains the HTML
message in case you need it for something later (for example,
following URLs embedded in it). Messages that have any non-HTML body
are automatically skipped (just piped through unchanged).
It is best used as a small procmail entry:
:0f
* Content-Type:.*html
|dehtml
However, you can also defang individual messages if you like from the
command line.
Anyway, it's a bit on the small side (the total size is 2584 bytes,
thanks mostly to Python 2.2's excellent "email" module and html2text),
but I don't maintain any packages that it seems like it would fit in,
and I can't identify any other package that does this in the "don't
clobber anything" way I like, hence the ITP.
I'm not really wedded to the name "dehtml" either, but everything else
I came up with seemed really wordy or inaccurate or both.
-- System Information
Debian Release: 3.0
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux host251 2.4.19-pre1-ac2 #1 Thu Feb 28 09:28:24 CST 2002 i686
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=en_US
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