That the slope becomes slippery does not in and of itself mean we cannot look at what was asked and frown. Raziel lays out a scenario that looks suspiciously like address harvesting a la spammers. So far, Raziel has not offered any further explanation of his/her intentions that might clarify this point.

In my mind, this question skates right at the edge. Given that useful conversation has occurred, I'm personally inclined toward leavgin this post stand.

The worst thing about including the "extracting emiail addresses" function is that it obscured the actual issue. Other posters have spoken to the technical issue at hand.

yours,
Michael

Actually my logic is that I hate SPAM, and since I can see no sensible reason for the code other than SPAM, my morals do not allow me to contribute to something that may be used for SPAM. The problem with your logic is that guns have several 'reasonable' uses. What use do you see for SPAM?

As a director on the board of a community-run ISP, I have been forced to recognize that SPAM is one of the key reasons that discourage people from using email.

If you can come up with a reasonable use to harvest email addresses from webpages, that is not SPAM related, I will agree that your comparison to guns is correct. In any case, I have the right to make a moral stand, whether or not you agree with my stand. Down vote me if you think that my opinion should be held against me.

If you can come up with a reasonable use to harvest email addresses from webpages

Before XML became widespread, I knew a company (which I shouldn't really talk about) that used HTML as their universal data format. It had the advantage of being browser-readable by almost everyone. Couldn't handle data like XML could, but it worked for them, espically with outside vendors.

A script like this might merely be processing email addresses from internal documents. Opt-in email lists? Employee email lists?

I dislike spam as much as you do. I but do -not- believe that we should be in the business of passing judgement on somebody for their *assumed* code uses.

But if he comes out and says "Yes, I'm writing an email harvester", you have my full support to clue-by-four him. :-)

Cheers,
ibanix

$ echo '$0 & $0 &' > foo; chmod a+x foo; foo;