Part of RFC 822 ignored by email module

[Bob Kline]

On 1/20/2011 12:23 PM, Carl Banks wrote:
> On Jan 20, 7:08 am, Bob Kline<bkl... at rksystems.com>  wrote:
>> I just noticed that the following passage in RFC 822:
>>
>>           The process of moving  from  this  folded   multiple-line
>>           representation  of a header field to its single line represen-
>>           tation is called "unfolding".  Unfolding  is  accomplished  by
>>           regarding   CRLF   immediately  followed  by  a  LWSP-char  as
>>           equivalent to the LWSP-char.
>>
>> is not being honored by the email module.  The following two invocations
>> of message_from_string() should return the same value, but that's not
>> what happens:
>>
>>   >>>  import email
>>   >>>  email.message_from_string("Subject: blah").get('SUBJECT')
>> 'blah'
>>   >>>  email.message_from_string("Subject:\n blah").get('SUBJECT')
>> ' blah'
>>
>> Note the space in front of the second value returned, but missing from
>> the first.  Can someone convince me that this is not a bug?
> That's correct, according to my reading of RFC 822 (I doubt it's
> changed so I didn't bother to look up what the latest RFC on that
> subject is.)
>
> The RFC says that in a folded line the whitespace on the following
> line is considered a part of the line.

Thanks for responding.  I think your interpretation of the RFC is the 
same is mine.  What I'm saying is that by not returning the same value 
in the two cases above the module is not "regarding CRLF immediately 
followed by a LWSP-char as equivalent to the LWSP-char."

-- 
Bob Kline
http://www.rksystems.com
mailto:bkline at rksystems.com