Question

I would like to know how to modify the below code to strip =20 characters at the end of many lines, and mainly to sort the messages chronologically from first received or sent to last. I am not sure if this would be an internal Perl routine or not.

#!/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; use Mail::Box::Manager;  my $file = shift || $ENV{MAIL}; my $mgr = Mail::Box::Manager->new(     access          => 'r', );  my $folder = $mgr->open( folder => $file ) or die '$file: Unable to open: $!\n';  for my $msg ($folder->messages) {     my $to          = join( ', ', map { $_->format } $msg->to );     my $from        = join( ', ', map { $_->format } $msg->from );     my $date        = localtime( $msg->timestamp );     my $subject     = $msg->subject;     my $body        = $msg->body;      # Strip all quoted text     $body =~ s/^>.*$//msg;      print <<''; From: $from To: $to Date: $date $body  } 

When trying to run this I get the following errors:

‘my’ variable $msg masks earlier declaration in same scope at x.pl line 16. syntax error at x.pl line 15, near ‘) ) ‘ syntax error at x.pl line 31, near ‘}’ (Might be a runaway multi-line << string starting on line 25) Execution of x.pl aborted due to compilation errors.

I am not sure as to why, as the syntax seems fine.

Answer 1

I guess that those instances of =20 are in the body of the message. Reading just a bit of the documentation for Mail::Message will reveal this helpful note:

BE WARNED that this returns you an object which may be encoded: use decoded() to get a body with usable data.

Thus instead of calling $msg->body in your loop, simply call $msg->decoded->string.

Accomplishing sorting should be easiest when you use Mail::Message::timestamp:

... for my $msg ( sort { $a->timestamp <=> $b->timestamp } $folder->messages) ) ...