Mail Fields and Information Keys

Information keys are nuggets of information that supercite extracts from various mail fields placed in the reply buffer by the reader. Information is kept in a list as key-value pairs and can be retrieved for use in reference headers with the function sc-field. In addition, other bits of data, composed and created by supercite, are also kept as key-value pairs. In the case of mail fields, the key is always the name of the field, cast to lower case characters, without the trailing colon. Thus, if the following fields were present in the original article:

Date: 08 April 1991, 17:32:09 EST
Subject: Better get out your asbestos suit

then, (sc-field "date") would return the string "08 April 1991, 17:32:09 EST", and (sc-field "subject") would return the string "Better get out your asbestos suit". Since the argument to sc-field can be any string, it is possible that the mail field will not be present, or that the string was incorrectly typed. In this case, sc-field will return a mumble string as defined in the variable sc-mumble-string. The default value for this variable is the empty string (i.e., "").

The variable sc-mail-fields-list contains a list of mail fields (as information keys), which supercite will extract for use with sc-fields. Only the values of these mail fields will be extracted. Default value for this variable is:

'("date"  "message-id"  "subject" "newsgroups" "references"
  "from"  "return-path" "path"    "reply-to"   "organization"
  "reply" )

Note that mail headers can also be removed from the body of the reply once their information has been extracted. See section Reply Buffer Initialization for more details.

The `From:' field will always be put into the information list exactly once. In addition to these information keys, supercite also always places the following keys into the information list:

sc-attribution

the selected attribution string.

sc-nested-citation

the nested citation string.

sc-citation

the non-nested citation string.

sc-from-address

email address extracted from the `From:' field.

sc-reply-address

email address extracted from the `Reply-To:' field.

sc-emailname

email terminus extracted from the `From:' field.

sc-initials

the author's initials.

sc-author

the author's full name.

sc-firstname

the author's first name.

sc-lastname

the author's last name.

sc-middlename-1

the author's first middle name.

As above, if the author's name has more than one middle name, they will appear as information keys with the appropriate index.