Re: nnml filename from summary buffer

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 01 Jul 2005, jdhunter@ace.bsd.uchicago.edu wrote:

>>>>>> "Ted" == Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:
> 
>     Ted> There's probably a way to do it in the API, but why do you
>     Ted> need the file name?  It's usually better to work in
>     Ted> file-independent ways, so your code can be adapted to nnimap
>     Ted> or nntp for example.
> 
> I need to pass the article contents off to an external script which
> takes a filename.  Alternatively I could get the entire buffer
> contents as a string and write it to a temporary file - do you know
> which function/variable provides access to the raw, unwashed, article
> which I could dump to a temp file?

Yes, I've done that in spam.el to pass to an external process.  The
discussion below applies to nntp, nnimap, nnml, etc. backends so it's
a clean solution to your problem.

Anyhow, here's how you can get an article into a buffer and then
return the string (from spam.el):

(defun spam-get-article-as-string (article)
  (when (numberp article)
    (with-temp-buffer
      (gnus-request-article-this-buffer
       article
       gnus-newsgroup-name)
      (buffer-string))))

This uses the CURRENT gnus-newsgroup-name, so if you are not in the
summary buffer or gnus-newsgroup-name is unset for another reason, it
won't work (gnus-newsgroup-name is set every time you enter a group
summary buffer).

Is there no way the external script can take STDIN rather than a file?
Many Unix utilities will take a "-" as an argument to mean "read from
STDIN."  That way, you can just get the article into a buffer and then
use the call-process-region function, instead of getting a string back
as this function does.

If you must put it into a file, use make-temp-file and write the
string or the temp-buffer contents to it with write-region...

Ted

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