Hello WilliamDee, and welcome to the Monastery!

I’m not familiar with MIME::Parser, but it occurs to me that it might be easier to just accept the output as-is, and post-process to remove the unwanted CR characters.

For example, if you know that an extracted string has no carriage returns that you want to keep, post-processing is as simple as:

$string =~ s/\r//g;
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If you need to be more precise, you can use a look-ahead assertion to remove only carriage returns that occur immediately before newlines:

$string =~ s/\r(?=\n)//g;
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Hope that helps,

Thank you for the welcome and the idea, Athanasius.

It is a possibility to do some post-processing only on text-files, if there are no other options. I'll admit that I'm not keen at the thought of slurping large files (2+ megabytes) into memory again and doing a regex replace like the following:

$fileguts =~ s/\r{2,}\n/\r\n/g;

That should reasonably efficient at the process. Your idea does raise another thought though: avoiding the mangling of files which come out of unix-based systems, changing \n to \r\n. It might be preferable to do something like:

$fileguts =~ s/\r+\n/\n/g;

In the interest of not potentially mangling files - for the moment I will continue to hang out in the hope of another, MIME::Parser-based fix. :)

Cheers!
William

PS: Another possibility might be to change the original MIME message before writing to disk, say from:

Content-Type: text/plain;

To:

Content-Type: application/x-msexcel;

A bit of an ugly hack to trick MIME::Parse, though probably doable. And might be preferable to the extra disk-load/regex-replace/disk-save cycle. While I'm not expecting hundreds of files per minute/second, it is best to assume that something like that might happen if an ISP error suddenly causes a surge or someone attempts a DoS/mailbomb attack.

Thank you Athanasius, I have gone down the path of changing the content-type to something that will extract text/plain as binary files (application/x-msexcel). The code I'm using now is:

    # open the file in raw/binary output for writing
    open MAILOUT, '>:raw', "$receiving/message-$thetime-$popcount.msg"
+ or LogWrite("Unable to open message-$thetime-$popcount.msg for writi
+ng: $!");
    # get the email into a temporary variable
    my $hold = $pop->HeadAndBody($popcount);
    # force it to use binary saving
    $hold =~ s/text\/plain/application\/x-msexcel/g;
    # write to file
    print MAILOUT $hold;
    # close the file
    close MAILOUT;
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And the text-files extracted by MIME::Parser are now saved without extra \r characters added to them.

Cheers for the help! :)
William

Is it possible to force MIME::Parser to extract text-files on a Windows system without the extra CR's on the end of lines?

Probably not, but I wouldn't even bother looking :) grab Path::Tiny and/or File::Find::Rule find some target files and normalize the newlines to what you need them to be

update: OTOH, if you subclass MIME::Parser::FileUnder, you could normalize the newlines in "purgable"

So no it isn't possible to force MIME::Parser to do this with a setting but only with code

Thank you, I was rather afraid of that. I guess that I'll have to stretch my knowledge and see how bad a job that I can manage.

Cheers!
William