[jira] Commented: (MIME4J-112) Define Limits Of Round Tripping In Mime4J

["Stefano Bagnara (JIRA)" <mi...@james.apache.org>]

    [ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/MIME4J-112?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12671347#action_12671347 ] 

Stefano Bagnara commented on MIME4J-112:
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I think that at least this should be satisfied:
"If the input message has been generated by mime4j then the round tripping have to be bitwise identical."
(maybe some english native can reword it, I hope it is understandable)

IIRC I added a testsuite to check that each "expected result" in our testsuite is identical to the result of its parsing and writing in output again.


> Define Limits Of Round Tripping In Mime4J
> -----------------------------------------
>
>                 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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