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From: ske@pkmab.se (Kristoffer Eriksson)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: CNews - now a pedantic software! : -(
Message-ID: <5298@pkmab.se>
Date: 13 Apr 91 04:08:26 GMT
References: <1991Apr03.042907.16938@buster.stafford.tx.us> <1991Apr04.221130.19697@comp.vuw.ac.nz> <1991Apr4.231602.17306@world.std.com>
Organization: Peridot Konsult i Mellansverige AB, Oerebro, Sweden
Lines: 39

In article <1991Apr4.231602.17306@world.std.com> geoff@world.std.com (Geoff Collyer) writes:
>It shouldn't cause problems, but it does.  B News (in conformance with
>RFC 1036) insists upon the space after the colon; if it's absent, B News
>will complain "Inbound news is garbled!" (as I recall) and drop the
>article

This is only part of the truth (as far as I can determine by reading the
B news source). B news indeed requires a space to recognize what header
line it is looking at (function type() in header.c), but only the colon
is required for it to consider the line a header line (plus, the header name
must start with letter and not contain spaces).

If the space is left out, the line will be treated as a non-standard header
line, in stead of the header the sender thought they supplied, but still a
header nonetheless.

The message about garbled news is produced if reading of the header part
of the article failes as a whole (function hread() in header.c). Leaving out
the space on some headers will not in general make hread() to return failure.
However, there are some other requirements that the header part has to meet,
in order not to fail. In particular, the From:, Date:, and Message-ID:
headers must be supplied (function frmread()). If the space is left out of
any of these three header lines, B news will perform the way you claim and
drop the article.

All examples of real-life left out spaces that have been quoted this far
by other posters here, only involved other non-essential headers, though.
The examples I've seen quoted involved the headers Distribution:, Sender:,
Expires:, Summary:, and References:. Inews will not complain about missing
spaces in these. These headers just will be ineffective, nothing else.

I suppose that missing spaces in the above-mentioned three essential
header lines would already have been discovered and corrected long ago,
since they _would_ cause the articles to be dropped.

-- 
Kristoffer Eriksson, Peridot Konsult AB, Hagagatan 6, S-703 40 Oerebro, Sweden
Phone: +46 19-13 03 60  !  e-mail: ske@pkmab.se
Fax:   +46 19-11 51 03  !  or ...!{uunet,mcsun}!sunic.sunet.se!kullmar!pkmab!ske