289611 - Errors when converting HTML to plain text (View->Message Body->As Plain Text)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 122876

(MailNews Core :: MIME, defect)

Description

[Doug Hockin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2

When converting HTML to plain text (View->Message Body->As Plain Text),
tags broken across end of lines by the MIME formatting are (sometimes?)
misinterpreted or missed.  In the attachment, a closing </i> tag
is split across the MIME end of line (I don't know much about MIME)
resulting in much of the message being displayed as italic.  There are
also extraneous '/' slashes that appear in the Plain Text that may
also be conversion errors.

Personally, I think the italic tags should have been disregarded
completely in the conversion, so there is no style in the plain text,
but if it's going to keep the italic, it needs to do it right.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set View->Message Body->As Plain Text
2. Send the attached email to yourself (?)
3. View the email

Actual Results:  
The closing tag of a <i></i> pair appears to have been missed and a large
part of the email ended up in italic.


Expected Results:  
Only the part between the <i></i> tags should have ended up in italic.  Or my
person preference is for all style tags to be disregarded and the result
should be unstyled plain text.

Comment 1

[Doug Hockin]

Attachment: Shows error in converting HTML to plain text

This email when viewed in Thunderbird set to show HTML emails as plain text,
display an error (errors?) in convertion.  A closing </i> tag is apparently
missed because it ended up broken across the MIME end of line.	Also there
are extraneous '/' slashes displayed at various places.

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

xref bug 230423

Comment 3

[Doug Hockin]

The xref'd bug 230423, is indeed very similar.  The only difference I can see is
that some of the follow on explanation in the middle of that bug attributes it
to tags inside of HTML tables.  The email I included with this bug has no tables
in it at all and I'm inclined to think this bugreport has something to do with
my suggestion of tags being broken over the MIME end of line boundaries.

bug 230423 also confirms that the conversion to plain text, as currently
implemented, is attempting to keep some styles like italic and bold, with I
disagree with.  In my opinion, that's not plain text, that's "Very Simple HTML",
but maybe there's something I'm missing as to the reasoning for doing it that way.

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

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Comment 5

[Doug Hockin]

I still get the same error when opening the attachement.

Comment 6

[Gary Kwong [:gkw] [:nth10sd] (NOT official MoCo now)]

Reporter, does the issue still occur with the latest supported 2.0.0.x / Shredder trunk nightlies?

(1.5.0.x is now end-of-life and the latest supported Thunderbird version 2 is 2.0.0.16)

Comment 7

[Doug Hockin]

I just opened the included .eml file with TB 2.0.0.16 and it still happens. The site that email came from has gone out of existence and I haven't gotten an email that displayed that problem from anywhere else for some time. It would be nice if the problem was fixed, but perhaps it's so obscure that the priority should be low.

Comment 8

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Confirming this behavior in both TB Shredder and SM 2.0pre-whatever.
Moving to Core; setting dependency.

Comment 9

[Doug Hockin]

I just recently received an airline flight Trip Summary and Receipt email from NWA and it happen twice in one email. TB 2.0.0.23.