Mail::Internet question

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Any help on this poser would be most appreciated

I am trying to use Mail::Internet to split an inbound email on STDIN into it's body and header parts so I can store what I need in a database.

I can deal with the header no probs but the body part is driving me up the wall, even though the documentation makes it sound simple.

The 'body' method should be a reference to an array containing the lines of the message body. Here is a sub I knocked up to parse the message.

sub parse_message {
    
    $message = new Mail::Internet \*STDIN;
    $sender = $message->head->get("From");
    @content = $message->body();
    $content = join('\n',@content);

}
[download]

All I get in $content or @content is something like ARRAY(0x8217224);

I know I'm probably overlooking something very basic here, can anybody help?

Many thanks

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Re: Mail::Internet question by liz (Monsignor) on Oct 08, 2003 at 12:13 UTC
RTFM: ;-) body ( BODY ) Returns the body of the message. This is a reference to an array. Each entry in the array represents a single line in the message. If you don't know what a reference is, check out perlreftut. In short: `$content = join( '',@{$message->body} );` [download] Liz	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Mail::Internet question by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Oct 08, 2003 at 12:16 UTC
From the Mail::Internet manual page: `METHODS body ( [ BODY ] ) Returns the body of the message. This is a reference to an array. Each entry in the array represents a single line in the message.` [download] So you will have to derefence the body first, like this: `@content = @{$message -> body};` [download] It would have been much more convenient if the body method was context aware, and returned a list in list context. But c'est la vie. You could ask the author of the package to add this feature. Abigail	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Mail::Internet question by Limbic~Region (Chancellor) on Oct 08, 2003 at 12:15 UTC
Anonymous Monk, I have done something similar with Mail::Audit, which is capable of handling different body types (MIME::Entity). There is some code in this to process the body of the message, regardless of type. I do not know how/if Mail::Internet handles mixed mode MIME message bodies which was a requirement for me at the time. Cheers - L~R	[reply]
Re: Mail::Internet question by Anonymous Monk on Oct 08, 2003 at 12:29 UTC
Thank you! all replies most useful	[reply]