Kris Deugau wrote: > If I recall the appropriate RFC correctly, you're looking for > something that - by definition - doesn't exist. Whitespace is > whitespace, so the content of a header begins with the first > non-whitespace character after the colon.
I checked <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html> for this: 2.2. Header Fields Header fields are lines composed of a field name, followed by a colon (":"), followed by a field body, and terminated by CRLF. A field name MUST be composed of printable US-ASCII characters (i.e., characters that have values between 33 and 126, inclusive), except colon. A field body may be composed of any US-ASCII characters, except for CR and LF. [...] 2.2.1. Unstructured Header Field Bodies Some field bodies in this standard are defined simply as "unstructured" (which is specified below as any US-ASCII characters, except for CR and LF) with no further restrictions. These are referred to as unstructured field bodies. Semantically, unstructured field bodies are simply to be treated as a single line of characters with no further processing (except for header "folding" and "unfolding" as described in section 2.2.3). 3.6.5. Informational fields The informational fields are all optional. The "Keywords:" field contains a comma-separated list of one or more words or quoted-strings. The "Subject:" and "Comments:" fields are unstructured fields as defined in section 2.2.1, and therefore may contain text or folding white space. subject = "Subject:" unstructured CRLF If I understand this correctly, the field body always starts with the character after the colon, whitespace or not. I'm quite certain that many SW implementations share your point of view, though. -- Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Sincerely Dipl. Inform. Ralph Seichter