Last night i solved yet another problem with Perl. It was a simple problem/solution, which i submit to you for a sanity check.

I'm writing a webmail script and saving sent mail to a pipe delimited flat file like so: 

print FILE "$when|$to|$from|$subject|$body\n";

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The problem was line breaks from the textarea messing up the $body part. I tried many combinations of textarea properties and such but only $body=~s/\n/ /g; got it all on one line, but that solution ruined the formatting of the original message which needs to be preserved.

My solution is to uuencode the contents of $body for saving, and uudecode $body for displaying. It seems to work very well but wonder if it's the best way or if there may be unforseen problems down the road. 

my $encoded_body = pack ("u", $body);
$encoded_body=~s/\n//g;
print FILE "$when|$to|$from|$subject|$encoded_body\n";

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Sample record: 
Fri Dec 15 15:34:10 2000|to@net.net|from@net.net|Hello|E5&AI<R!I><R!T:
+&4@><V%M><&QE(&UE><W-A9V4A#0H-"D)Y92X-"@`` 
>

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Decoding: 
$decoded_body = unpack ("u", $encoded_body);

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Yields: 
This is the sample message!

Bye.

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thanks - epoptai

In reply to uuencoding to deal with line breaks by epoptai

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