Quoted(3)

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

SYNOPSIS
    use Text::Quoted;
    Text::Quoted::set_quote_characters( qr/[:]/ ); # customize recognized quote characters
    my $structure = extract($text);

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

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".

COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 2002-2003 Kasei Limited Copyright (C) 2003-2004 Simon Cozens Copyright (C) 2004-2013 Best Practical Solutions, LLC

This software is distributed WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

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