Stripping "hard returns" from UNIX mail files

[Larry Wall]

In article <657182670.22483 at ontmoh.UUCP> peter at ontmoh.UUCP (Peter Renzland) writes:
: patrick at casbs.Stanford.EDU (Patrick Goebel) asks for a UNIX utility
: to remove "hard returns" from mail messages for subsequent processing
: by MS-DOS wordprocessors.
: 
: Unix considers it natural for text to be made up of lines, and all
: programs that do useful things with text assume that such lines are
: within some reasonable limit.

Painting with a broad brush here, aren't you?  Both Gnu emacs and Perl
agree that the only "reasonable limit" on line length is the amount of
swap space available on your machine.

: This corresponds to things that naturally
: contain lines (text in books or on your display, or on typewriter, or
: a line printer), and those things, naturally, have limits on the line
: length.
:
: The RETURN key, and its code, is an implementation of the typewriter's
: "carriage" return.

Fair enough.  But someday we have to escape the typewriter/punchcard metaphor.
Word processors are just beginning to get us out of this straitjacket.

: Text which is thus made up of lines can easily be formatted in all sorts
: of ways.  But, if we format it so that we have (limitless) multiline
: paragraphs and no longer any line separators, some of our programs that
: are so handy with lines of text may break in the face of possibly huge
: paragraphs.

So rewrite the programs so they aren't busted.

: Having said that, you could try something like this little program:
: 
: awk '
: NF==0	{ if(LINE) { print LINE ; LINE="" } ; print ; next}
: 	{ if(LINE) LINE=LINE " " $0 ; else LINE=LINE $0 }
: END	{ print LINE }
: ' $*

I think gawk will now handle "infinite" lines, but older awks will blow
up on longer paragraphs.  It would be a tad nicer if it threw in an
extra space after lines that end a sentence.

: I would prefer to use the PC wordprocessor's text import facilities to
: take standard line-oriented text and convert it to its own paragraph
: format.

Some of use don't have such a clever importer.  Yeah, I know, rewrite the
programs...

Sigh.

Larry