Re: Dash-escaping clarification

[Adam Back <adam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hmm I don't think it would be a good idea to allow dash-escaping of
literally anything because then you can't reverse the transformation
and '- ' is commonly used for bullet points where as the other cases
----- separated nested PGP signatures and other content types are not
common, and 'From ' is a prexisting common exception.

Isn't it rather just:

- dash escape nested -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE----- (et al)
- dash escape From

Adam

On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 08:46:34AM -0500, David Shaw wrote:
> 
> Section 7.1 (Dash-Escaped Text) of bis-07 says, in part, that
> dash-escaped text is "the ordinary cleartext where every line starting
> with a dash '-' (0x2D) is prefixed by the sequence dash '-' (0x2D) and
> space ' ' (0x20)."
> 
> Since the most common use of dash-escaped text is in email, both PGP
> and GnuPG (by default) also dash-escape lines starting with the word
> "From " (with the space).  This is for the usual mbox-inspired
> reasons.  If the "From " line isn't escaped, then some downstream mail
> system may escape it, thus breaking the signature.
> 
> Nothing in the draft seems to discourage dash-escaping more than just
> the lines beginning with a dash.  Still, I am concerned with the
> receiving side not knowing that these other lines may be escaped as
> well (they may match on a dash-space-dash at the beginning of the
> line, rather than dash-space).  A sentence saying something like "Any
> other line MAY be dash-escaped as well at the discretion of the
> sender" would be very helpful here.
> 
> David