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Original Usenet message from alt.ascii-art, 3 Apr 2000.
Detecting ASCII art in emails

Detecting ASCII art in emails

Hello.

I am writing a program to detect ASCII art in email messages.

I am currently designing the heuristics, or to put it another way,
I'm trying to work out how you can identify the presence of ASCII art.

I thought I'd write and ask you folks who do lots of it what you
think the determining features are.

My observations so far:

There's lots of spaces, often at the start of a line.
Spaces are used differently to those in text.
There are few tab characters used.
Many non-alphanumeric characters are used.


If you can add any more features, such as the alphabetic characters
that you use a lot of, then I'd be most grateful.

(The program will be in Perl, but any code or pseudocode will also
be warmly received.)

Many thanks,
Ian.

Original message headers
X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit
X-Google-Thread: f996b,c288d57efd7c580d,start
X-Google-Attributes: gidf996b,public
From: Ian Howlett <ih...@ukc.ac.uk>
Subject: Detecting ASCII art in emails
Date: 2000/04/03
Message-ID: <38E...@ukc.ac.uk>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 606064519
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
X-Complaints-To: new...@ukc.ac.uk
X-Trace: spruce.ukc.ac.uk 954771513 8908 129.12.4.49 (3 Apr 2000 14:18:33 GMT)
Organization: University of Kent
Mime-Version: 1.0
NNTP-Posting-Date: 3 Apr 2000 14:18:33 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art
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