(RFC934) Re: extra dashes in PGP-related blocks?

[strick@techwood.org]

THUS SPAKE jrochkin@cs.oberlin.edu (Jonathan Rochkind):
# 
# Does anyone know what it is that's putting in these "- "s, why it's putting
# them in, and how to stop it?

They're part of RFC934 and they are the correct standard way to 
encapsulate messages inside messages, short of using MIME.
Many mailers produce & handle these correctly.  

The extra "- " are due to "Character-Stuffing the Encapsulation Boundary".
What you&we need is filters to extract encapsulations that unstuff
nested encapsulations.

Relevant excerpt from RFC934 follows.    --strick

--
--
--


Network Working Group                        Marshall T. Rose (Delaware)
Request for Comments: 934                       Einar A. Stefferud (NMA)
                                                            January 1985

              Proposed Standard for Message Encapsulation

  ...

Message Encapsulation

  ...

   Definitions: a draft forwarding message consists of a header portion
   and a text portion.  If the text portion is present, it is separated
   from the header portion by a blank line.  Inside the text portion a
   certain character string sequence, known as an "encapsulation
   boundary", has special meaning.  Currently (in existing
   digestification agents), an encapsulation boundary (EB) is defined as
   a line in the message which starts with a dash (decimal code 45,
   "-").  Initially, no restriction is placed on the length of the
   encapsulation boundary, or on the characters that follow the dash.

  ...

      2.3. Encapsulated Messages

      Each encapsulated message is bounded by two EBs: a pre-EB, which
      occurs before the message; and, a post-EB, which occurs after the
      message.  For two adjacent encapsulated messages, the post-EB of
      the first message is also the pre-EB of the second message.
      Consistent with this, two adjacent EBs with nothing between them
      should be treated as enclosing a null message, and thus two or
      more adjacent EBs are equivalent to one EB.

  ...


Character-Stuffing the Encapsulation Boundary

   It should be noted that the protocol is general enough to support
   both general forwarding of messages and the specific case of digests.
   Unfortunately, there is one issue of message encapsulation which
   apparently is not addressed by any forwarding agent (to the authors'
   knowledge) in the ARPA-Internet: what action does the forwarding
   agent take when the encapsulation boundary occurs within a the text
   portion of a message being forwarded?  Without exception, this
   circumstance is ignored by existing forwarding agents.

   To address this issue, this memo proposes the following
   character-stuffing scheme: the encapsulation boundary is defined as a
   line which starts with a dash.  A special case is made for those
   boundaries which start with a dash and are followed by a space
   (decimal code 32, " ").

      During forwarding, if the forwarding agent detects a line in the
      text portion of a message being forwarded which starts with the
      encapsulation boundary, the forwarding agent outputs a dash
      followed by a space prior to outputting the line.

      During bursting, if the bursting agent detects an encapsulation
      boundary which starts with a dash followed by a space, then the
      bursting agent does not treat the line as an encapsulation
      boundary, and outputs the remainder of the line instead.

   This simple character-stuffing scheme permits recursive forwardings.

  ...

--
--
--
  strick <...!{ihnp4,akgua,allegra,gatech}!techwood.org!strick>


  echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln256%Pln256/snlbx]sb3135071790101768542287578439snlbxq'|dc
                                           --keithv@cs.berkeley.edu(?)

--