JW> Wicked, thanks Sean. I've stumbled (with a little help from
 JW> Mark) onto the FTS and FSC docs but I'm having trouble
 JW> figuring out the message structure.

let's see what we can do about that ;)

 JW> I understand that everything before the actualy message body
 JW> is null terminated, and I can parse that out without a
 JW> problem. What I think is odd, and therefore assume I'm
 JW> misunderstanding, is that the message body appears to start
 JW> with the AREA: keyword.

i'm assuming that you've gotten past the PKT header? if not, it is 48 bytes
long... then you have the first message header... packed message headers
are 34 bytes long and then variable lengths for the To, From and Subj
lines...

so, to read the packed message header, you pump out the first 34 bytes and
then read three times for the null terminated strings... after that,
everything till the terminating null is all message body... everything...

 JW> What I've seen is that different messages have varying fields
 JW> between the AREA: keyword and the beginning of the actual text
 JW> of the message. This makes it pretty hard to separate the part
 JW> of the message body I want to see, and the part I don't want
 JW> to see.

and you can't go by the assumtion that all control lines are up at the top
of the message body right after the header block... why? because some
control lines are place within the message body...

the thing to do is to get past the header and then start reading everything
up to the terminating null character... stuff starting with the CTRL-A
(0x01) character and terminating with the CR or CRLF pair is the control
lines that you are wanting to throw away so do so while reading the message
body for the content...

when you get done skipping over the 0x01...CR|CRLF stuff, you should only
have the message body remaining... you'll also want to be filtering (in
some cases) the ALT-141 "�" character as QWK and some bbs' use
that as a line wrap indicator... and then you have the seenby and path
lines that you'll also probably be throwing away...

it is a good idea to read those control lines and adapt the message body to
the proper character set by looking for and acting upon the CHRS and/or
CODEPAGE control lines to convert from them to the 8859-1 or whatever it is
that is the default in your message stuff...

 JW> I *think* I've figured out (need a few more packets to
 JW> confirm) that the fields that comprise the part I don't want
 JW> to see are separated by a ^M^A token, whereas the message body
 JW> starts with a single ^M.

can't rely on that... some stuff is CR (^M) and other stuff is CRLF
(^M^J)... the ^A stands on its own as the start of the control line
indicator...

 JW> Is this the way it's supposed to be? Seems kinda laisse faire
 JW> (no, I can't spell that).

neither can it... hope the above helps... enjoy!

)\/(ark