[Pan-users] Re: Filtering non-Latin script postings

[Duncan]

JCA <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted
below, on  Fri, 15 Jun 2007 16:32:30 -0700:

>    Sometimes I come across postings in Arabic or some other languages
> with scripts other than the Roman one. How can I filter these postings
> out, assuming that the subject line (or the message body) is entirely
> written in one of such scripts?

AFAIK, filtering/scoring on the body is unfortunately not possible the 
way pan does things.  As well, it has been awhile since I tried, but I 
don't believe pan can filter/score on headers not in the overview 
either.  slrn, which scoring format pan borrows, can, but recommends you 
don't, since it requires downloading the actual message to score it in 
that case.  Never-the-less, I've argued for a long time (since before pan 
did scoring, when it was filtering only) that pan needs this anyway, 
since even if it has to happen after download, if it means being able to 
kill a message one doesn't want to see, it's still many times better than 
having to kill it manually, and if you have to download it and kill it 
manually, it's still downloaded, so no difference there, just in whether 
one has the irritating task of doing it manually or not.  However, while 
Charles agrees it would be a good feature, he marked it "bluesky", and 
backburnered it.  If I was a coder, I'd have submitted a patch for it a 
long time ago and I'm sure it'd have been included by now, but...

That said, it should be possible to score based on the subject line.  You 
may see the literal subject line including an ISO-number or the like 
denoting the encoding.  This is a backward compatible hack to enable 
display of non-ASCII chars in what by old standard only supported ASCII.  
Anyway, if you see it, I believe you can match on that in your scoring.  
Hopefully that'll work for the subject line scoring, at least.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman