[Tutor] Parsing an mbox mail file

[Danny Yoo]

On Sat, 27 Jan 2001, Sheila King wrote:

> : So we could adjust your code like this:
> :
> :###
> :    currentmssg = messages.next()
> :    if (currentmssg ==None):
> :        break
> :    print currentmssg.fp.read()  # let's look at the msg contents 
> :###
> 
> Interesting. I tried this out, and it sort of prints the bodies
> without the headers. But not exactly. Every once in a while, it prints
> one to three lines of the header.

That is a bit strange!  I tested the code on my own /var/spool/mail, and
it skips over the headers for my mail file.

You might want to check that your file is strickly in an mbox format ---
that's one thing I can think of that would cause such behavior.


> I am going to play around with this a bit more, later. But for now, I've
> "solved" my problem, by not saving the messages in a strict mbox format. I'm
> preceding each message with a message separator line. Since I know what the
> message separator line is, I can read up to that line, and then discard it
> with no ill effects.

This will work.  If you have time, maybe you could make a small test
"mail" file that duplicates that weird behavior.

I'm glad that your program works now!