[PATCH] Clean up author display for some "Last, First" cases

[Carl Worth]

On Wed, 21 Apr 2010 22:04:39 -0700, Dirk Hohndel <hohndel at infradead.org> wrote:
> +/* clean up the uggly "Lastname, Firstname" format that some mail systems
> + * (most notably, Exchange) are creating to be "Firstname Lastname" 
> + * To make sure that we don't change other potential situations where a 
> + * comma is in the name, we check that we match one of these patterns
> + * "Last, First" <first.last at company.com>
> + * "Last, First MI" <first.mi.last at company.com>

This is an interesting idea. We could make it a little more flexible by
doing a regexp comparison of "first.*last" against the email address,
(perhaps people have email addresses like carl_worth at example.com?)

> +    char *cleanauthor,*testauthor;

I'd much rather see an underscore separating two words in a single
identifier, (so clean_author, test_author).

> +	/* let's assemble what we think is the correct name */
> +	lname = comma - author;
> +	fname = strlen(author) - lname - 2;
> +	strncpy(cleanauthor, comma + 2, fname);
> +	*(cleanauthor+fname) = ' ';
> +	strncpy(cleanauthor + fname + 1, author, lname);
> +	*(cleanauthor+fname+1+lname) = '\0';

The comment above, ("what we think is the correct name"), didn't help me
understand what the code is doing. And the code is hard enough to follow
that I could really use some help. Something like:

/* Break at comma and reverse: "Last, First etc." -> "First Last etc." */

Lots of little additions here and there so plenty of chance for an
off-by-one. Do we have a test case for this yet?

> +	/* make a temporary copy and see if it matches the email */
> +	testauthor = xstrdup(cleanauthor);

It would be preferable to use talloc functions consistently. (Existing
occurrences of xstrdup in the code base are for the sake of
talloc-unfriendly glib data structures like GHashTable.)

As is, testauthor is leaking.

-Carl
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