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[Madgun68]

I'm writing some software for myself to bulk decode newsgroups, but there's one thing puzzling me..

Whole messages have a BEGIN and END. On multipart messages, the END may be 10 messages away.

The question I have is this: Is there sure-fire way of determining which parts of a post contains the encoded bits? I know the lines begin with M but what else do I look for? (Line length?)

I'd appreciate any suggestions..

[zurt]

Yup as Far as I Remember, the structure, was something like that

BEGIN 664 ....
Mxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mxxxxxxxxxxxx
Mxxxxxxxxxxxx
END

AFAIK the line lenght was always the same...

Antonio

[Madgun68]

Perhaps it's just paranoia on my part, but I envisioned some [self censored] posting a message that mimics a uuencoded set of messages.

Anyhoo, I've pretty much got it all figured out how to deal with this crap correctly. For multipart messages, the program does the following:

Basically, an entire newsgroup is processed. The "one part" messages are encoded while multiparts are saved to a temp directory. Once the entire group is processed, it goes in the temp directory, finds all parts for a file and sorts them, creates the single part file and decodes it if all the files are present. (If you don't have all the files, it'll just leave them in case you get the rest later.)

What I'm eventually hoping for is two things:
Fetching news at intervals (like every half hour) and temp files that are only stored for a set period. That way, you have x amount of time for the complete set to arrive before it removes the files.

Oh yeah.. And I suppose a gui/prefs at some point would help too. :-)

(And to think.. I'm only doing this because I'm too cheap/can't afford a similar program on the PC. ;-))

[T_Bone]

> (And to think.. I'm only doing this because I'm too cheap/can't afford a similar program on the PC. )

I use Grabit (for windows) under Winex3 in linux (because the binary downloaders for linux SUCK)
It's free.

[adolescent]

T_Bone wrote:
> (And to think.. I'm only doing this because I'm too cheap/can't afford a similar program on the PC. )

I use Grabit (for windows) under Winex3 in linux (because the binary downloaders for linux SUCK)
It's free.

Have you tried BNR? I used this on Windows and also on Linux and haven't found anything better out there.

[CodeSmith]

@Madgun68:

(And to think.. I'm only doing this because I'm too cheap/can't afford a similar program on the PC. )

Get WinRAR. It will decode uuencoded files (name them whatever.uue), it has a GUI, it will also do lha and its native format is better than ZIP. It's also free :-)

[Madgun68]

Well, I do want a solution for the Amiga/Morphos too. I'm not writing a complete newsreader. This just works with NewsCoaster.

The uudecoding section is (hopefully) complete. I just need to add the ydec stuff and make sure it works on large multi-part stuff.

[Madgun68]

This has been an interesting experience to say the least. There are several bulk yenc encoders that don't properly follow the guidelines that I've had to make adjustments for.. And now I need to make some changes because several of the amiga's uudecoders are ignorant.

The program is working quite well though! I've probably completed 90% of the functionality, and the multipart decoder has been tested with archives that span over hundreds of messages.

Now if I only had a dime for every mistake I've made or every time I've decided to rewrite part of the program..