X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit
X-Google-Thread: f996b,c288d57efd7c580d
X-Google-Attributes: gidf996b,public
From: parallax@apk.net (Wesley Clifford)
Subject: Re: Detecting ASCII art in emails
Date: 2000/04/04
Message-ID: <38ea4f82.27476028@news.apk.net>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 606729216
References: <38E8A839.12EE@ukc.ac.uk> <8cdh7d$j6t$2@bigboote.WPI.EDU>
X-Complaints-To: abuse@apk.net
X-Trace: plonk.apk.net 954880263 2633 207.54.160.159 (4 Apr 2000 20:31:03 GMT)
Organization: APK Net
NNTP-Posting-Date: 4 Apr 2000 20:31:03 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.ascii-art

On 4 Apr 2000 19:53:17 GMT, pulp@WPI.EDU (Joshua E Millard) wrote:

>Ian Howlett (ih2@ukc.ac.uk) wrote:
>: 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.
>: 
>: My observations so far:
>: 
>: Many non-alphanumeric characters are used.
>
>I would bet that you could get fairly solid results if you searched for
>occurances of /, |, and \ as your primary hooks.  Toss in - and _, maybe +
>and some others (. and , and ' and = and others) if you like, or as a
>lower-weighted factor for your heuristic, but in terms of raw efficiency,
>the pipe and slashes are probably more omnipresent in ASCII art and
>lacking in non-ART posts than any other characters.  The first 80% or so
>of the search is the easist part.  :)

Just don't search through any emails pertaining to Unix or Dos.

cat //usr/my_file.txt|grep -i "/[../]"

:-D

--Wesley

The only stupid question is the unasked question.
And that's a good thing, because I hate stupid questions!