Define Limits Of Round Tripping In Mime4J
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Key: MIME4J-112
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MIME4J-112
Project: JAMES Mime4j
Issue Type: Task
Affects Versions: 0.6
Reporter: Robert Burrell Donkin
Fix For: 0.7
By round tripping, I mean parsing some MIME document into a fully decomposed
form and then recreating a new version of the document from this form.
In theory, Mime4J decomposition and recomposition could be made perfect with no
loss of information. In other words, given a MIME document, the parser could
completely decompose the document and a bitwise identical copy could be
recomposed.
In practice, the limits of support are questionable. Some limitations may be
expedient. For example, perhaps comments and encoding of ASCII characters are
not sufficiently important to be worth preserving. Other limitations may arise
from MIME documents which are not strictly compliant with the specification -
for example, the use of unescaped non-ASCII characters in MIME headers may mean
that the output would need to be escaped to ensure compliance.
It is important to define and describe the limits of round tripping so that
users and developers are clear about the level of support MIme4J claims. In
addition, sufficient unit tests should be created to ensure in confidence that
documents within these limits are correctly handled.
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