Reply-prefix ("Re:") default regex

[Paul van der Walt <paul@denknerd.org>]

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Hello Gnus,

This is my first post to this list, so please forgive me if i break all
the written and unwritten rules.  [and my first posting hasn't showed up
after 16h, so this is potentially a double-post]

I recently ran into an issue where a French speaker i was communicating
with had "Re : ..." as their reply subject prefix (note the leading
space before the colon).  This quickly ended up with us bouncing emails
around with such lovely subject lines as "Re: Re : Re: Re : Re: ...", et
cetera, ad infinitum.  This phenomenon, of surrounding certain
punctuation marks with extra spaces, turns out to be A Thing™ in French
writing [0].  I discovered that by making a very small modification to
the term `message-subject-re-regexp`, the problem was solved for me,
locally (it's in my configuration files ATM).  But since this might be
something that's useful to others, i threw a patch together, attached.

Of course, i could understand if such cultural (non-anglophone?) cruft
were undesirable in the Gnus code base, but perhaps others might benefit
from this.  If not, i am sorry for wasting your collective time.  If the
fix is desirable yet wrong in some other way, rest assured that you all
have my deepest apologies, i don't mean to step on anyone's toes.

Thank you and have a good day,
p.

0. <http://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tcdnstyl-chap?lang=eng&lettr=chapsect17&info0=17.07>


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From 62c0f7262acae856dcd43cb4fb7868c5dc1ec857 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Paul van der Walt <paul@denknerd.org>
Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2015 22:27:07 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] message.el (message-subject-re-regexp): More liberal regex.

* message.el (message-subject-re-regexp): Match French style ("Re :")
reply subject prefixes.
---
 lisp/ChangeLog  | 5 +++++
 lisp/message.el | 2 +-
 2 files changed, 6 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/lisp/ChangeLog b/lisp/ChangeLog
index 324f473..05d68f0 100644
--- a/lisp/ChangeLog
+++ b/lisp/ChangeLog
@@ -1,3 +1,8 @@
+2015-08-14  Paul van der Walt  <paul@denknerd.org>
+
+	* message.el (message-subject-re-regexp): Match French style ("Re :")
+	reply subject prefixes.
+
 2015-08-06  Paul Eggert  <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
 
 	* message.el (message-send-form-letter): Change (message (format ...))
diff --git a/lisp/message.el b/lisp/message.el
index 26655f3..54be212 100644
--- a/lisp/message.el
+++ b/lisp/message.el
@@ -300,7 +300,7 @@ any confusion."
 		 regexp))
 
 (defcustom message-subject-re-regexp
-  "^[ \t]*\\([Rr][Ee]\\(\\[[0-9]*\\]\\)*:[ \t]*\\)*[ \t]*"
+  "^[ \t]*\\([Rr][Ee]\\(\\[[0-9]*\\]\\)* ?:[ \t]*\\)*[ \t]*"
   "*Regexp matching \"Re: \" in the subject line."
   :group 'message-various
   :link '(custom-manual "(message)Message Headers")
-- 
2.5.0