RTF support for MOTDs

[humb4b4]

ventrilo supports RTF in MOTDS:
 http://myventriloserver.com/blog/ventrilo-motd-adding-custom-colors-fonts-and-other-styles

currently mangler displays the raw rtf data which isnt human readable.

server with a RTF MOTD:
87.242.76.222:3871

[x87bliss]

The RTF in MOTDs must always start with "{\rtf"

As a quick solution to address the readability of RTF MOTDs, you could have Mangler check for this string, and if it exists strip all the non-essential RTF markup.

The syntax for RTF seems pretty simple. Everything is 'grouped' in braces. These braces signify when to push and pop the current 'state' of the reader from a stack. Although for the purposes of just stripping out RTF markup, you don't really need to keep a stack.

There are also 'control words' which each start with a '\'. These words are delimited by any character which is not a letter and not a digit (the convention is to use a space ' ', or the '\' from a following control word). If the delimiter was a '\' then you interpret the next control word. If it was a space ' ', then you ignore that one space. Then any following text until the next '\' or brace should be displayed to the user.

Most importantly for stripping out RTF markup, Microsoft states that RTF readers don't need to interpret every control word; however, they must safely ignore the ones that they don't understand. One specific command that every RTF reader MUST understand is the '\*' control word. This will appear immediately after an opening brace, and everything until the next closing brace must be ignored and discarded.

Finally as a measure of readability the '\par' control word should probably be implemented as it signifies a new line. In addition '\line', '\sect', and '\page' should probably all be interpreted as line breaks as well.

The one thing I don't know is how actual CR\LFs in the RTF text itself are handled. I don't know if they're ignored by the reader or accepted as part of the visible text. Although based on what I've read, I think they should be visible to the user (i.e. not be ignored).

Source:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa140277(office.10).aspx

[x87bliss]

Strips RTF encoded MOTDs of RTF markup, to make them human readable.

[ekilfoil]

This feature is screaming to be implemented by you...

[x87bliss]

I uploaded a patch for r814

The patch basically checks every MOTD, and if it's not RTF encoded, it just returns without modifying it.

However, if it is RTF encoded, the stripMotdRtf function will parse it and basically remove almost all RTF markup. It correctly processes \tab to '\t'. Then \par, \line, \sect, and \page all are translated to "\r\n".

Finally it also translates the \'hh control word into the appropriate character replacements.

The new string that is created is of type std::string, so it (de)allocation should be handled automatically.

This solution should make all RTF based MOTDs at least human readable. However, I'm sure at some point you'd want to actually support the RTF formatting for eye candy.

[Haxar]

That sounds smart.

[humb4b4]

thanks, fixed in r834