RE: [MacPerl] beginner's q...

["Creede Lambard (Volt Computer)" <a-creela@microsoft.com>]

<disclaimer>Even though I work here at Microsoft -- and on IE/OE for Mac, as
it turns out -- this is not an authoritative, official, Microsoft
answer.</disclaimer> But I think it's correct. :)

If you grab a random text-only message out of your Inbox in Outlook Express
and drop it on the Desktop, it exports a text file. At least it did when I
tried it just now. <grin> I suspect Eudora and other e-mail programs would
do the same. It produces straight Mac-type text, data fork only. These rules
are probably different for mail sent with other MIME types, but that's a
different subject.

So, if all you want to is convert a piece of text-only mail to a file that's
recognizable as text, you can create this script in MacPerl and save it as a
droplet:

#!perl -w
MacPerl::SetFileInfo("ttxt","TEXT",@ARGV);

Then drag a file onto that droplet and it changes the type and creator to
TEXT/ttxt (SimpleText read/write). I have about a  half-dozen of these on my
desktop for converting among various text file types (read-only, read-write,
BBEdit, MacPerl, etc.)

-- Creede

> -----Original Message-----
> From: jay.bedsole@motorola.com [mailto:jay.bedsole@motorola.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 04, 1999 6:23 AM
> To: MacPerl
> Subject: Re: [MacPerl] beginner's q...
> 
> 
> Sean writes:
> 
> > (But merely changing the type/creator of a MS Word document
> > will probably result in an unreadable mess. You'd probably
> > be better off scripting a word-processor to read in the file
> > and save it as text.)
> 
> Since we're talking about an email program, I suspect that
> the files are of type TEXT. The creator code is probably
> that of MS Word (MSWD?). If this is the case, changing the
> creator is all that you need to do. It's unlikely that the
> files are in MS Word binary format... unless we're talking
> about attachments - then that's a whole new ball game.
> 
> Joshua's MOG script will do the trick, though it's a little
> over the top and not too friendly to this specific task. I
> suspect Nick would prefer to have a script that doesn't
> require any user input. I've got a much smaller droplet that
> does what you want (I think). I'll be happy to post it, but
> it will have to wait until tomorrow because it's at home and
> I'm not.
> 
> jay
> 
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