NAME

Text::Quoted - Extract the structure of a quoted mail message

SYNOPSIS

    use Text::Quoted;
    my $structure = extract($text);

    # Optionally, customize recognized quote characters:
    Text::Quoted::set_quote_characters( qr/[:]/ );

DESCRIPTION

"Text::Quoted" examines the structure of some text which may contain multiple different levels of quoting, and turns the text into a nested data structure.

The structure is an array reference containing hash references for each paragraph belonging to the same author. Each level of quoting recursively adds another list reference. So for instance, this:

    > foo
    > # Bar
    > baz

    quux

turns into:

    [
      [
        { text => 'foo', quoter => '>', raw => '> foo' },
        [
            { text => 'Bar', quoter => '> #', raw => '> # Bar' }
        ],
        { text => 'baz', quoter => '>', raw => '> baz' }
      ],

      { empty => 1 },
      { text => 'quux', quoter => '', raw => 'quux' }
    ];

This also tells you about what's in the hash references: "raw" is the paragraph of text as it appeared in the original input; "text" is what it looked like when we stripped off the quotation characters, and "quoter" is the quotation string.

FUNCTIONS

extract

  my $struct = extract($text, \%arg);

Takes a single string argument which is the text to extract quote structure from. Returns a nested datastructure as described above.

Second argument is optional: a hashref of options. The only valid argument at present is:

  no_separators - never mark paragraphs as "separators"

Exported by default.

set_quote_characters

Takes a regex ("qr//") matching characters that should indicate a quoted line. By default, a very liberal set is used:

    set_quote_characters(qr/[!#%=|:]/);

The character ">" is always recognized as a quoting character.

If "undef" is provided instead of a regex, only ">" will remain as a quote character.

Not exported by default, but exportable.

combine_hunks

  my $text = combine_hunks( $arrayref_of_hunks );

Takes the output of "extract" and turns it back into text.

Not exported by default, but exportable.

CREDITS

Most of the heavy lifting is done by a modified version of Damian Conway's "Text::Autoformat".

AUTHOR

Best Practical Solutions, LLC <modules@bestpractical.com>

LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.