250529 - Gratuitous spaces inserted before the quoting prefix ">"

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 114954

(MailNews Core :: Composition, defect)

Description

[Seungbeom Kim]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040616

When I compose a message which has quoting prefixes ">", sometimes I see that a
gratuitous space character is inserted before each ">".

This seems to happen always when I copy some quoted text and paste it somewhere
else. In the composition window, the pasted text does not appear in blue, and if
I save the message and reopen it in the Drafts folder I see they appear not with
the vertical bar but with the ">" characters, and the message source (Ctrl-U)
shows that blanks are prepended for those lines that appear with ">".

The difference disappears when you close the original composition window and
presss [Edit Draft...] in the Drafts folder.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Choose any message and press [Reply] or Ctrl-R. (plain text mode)
2. Select some portion of the quoted text and copy it to the clipboard.
3. Paste the copied text outside the original quotation.
4. Save the message by pressing [Save] or Ctrl-S.
5. Go to the Drafts folder and open the saved message. Press Ctrl-U to view the
source. Press [Edit Draft...] to see the difference disappear.
Actual Results:  
The pasted quotation, although looking exactly the same as the original
quotation (except for the different color), is internally treated in a different
way.
1. It does not appear in blue in the composition window.
2. In the Drafts folder (or Sent or an actual newsgroup) it has ">" marks
instead of the vertical bar.
3. In the message source window, the prepending spaces are revealed.

Expected Results:  
If you copy and paste some text, they should be identical.
1. The copy should appear in blue in the composition window.
2. In the Drafts folder (or wherever) it should have the vertical bar instead of
">" marks.
3. In the message source window, it should have no gratuitous spaces at the
beginning of each line.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

You're not going to believe this, but this is AS DESIGNED.
See bug 168420 and the FAQ attached to that bug.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 114954 ***