I love it when I make stupid mistakes.
One of the unfortunate things about text processing is that there are a billion ways to to exactly the wrong thing. Case in point, when using perl’s split function which creates an array out of a string you can specify the PCRE /,*\s+/ (which means “zero or more commas followed by one or more instance of whitespace”) and perl will happily do EXACTLY what you didn’t want it to do. What you really meant was /,\s*/ (which translates to “exactly one comma followed by zero or more instances of whitespace.”) This is of course the programmer’s fault, not the language because both of those are valid regular expressions and would evaluate perfectly fine if I had made the input string <thing>, </thing><thing> instead of </thing><thing>,</thing><thing> (the difference being the first one has a space between the comma and the second </thing><thing>).
I told you that story to inform you that if you are using my imap.pl script you are in possesion of said flaw. You may get the updated copy of imap.pl right here.
WHOOPS! :(
Tags: technology