[MIME] Towards parsing + rendering

[jchook]

Description

Re: symfony/mime.

Code that renders and parses MIME appears to live scattered within the AST, and enforces some unnecessary rigidity as a result. For example, we have a general lack of control over rendering details like the hard-coded boundary prefixes that remain difficult to circumvent, and no plans for general MIME parsing capabilities.

Imagine extracting the outermost rendering and parsing code into Renderer and Parser classes.

Such a refactor could pave the way towards an unprecedented "full-duplex" PHP MIME parsing + rendering library that could parse a MIME document, examine, modify, and re-render it, (e.g. perhaps with a different transfer encoding), all with OO fine-tuning of parsing and rendering logic.

Example

use Symfony\Component\Mime\Textual\Parser;
use Symfony\Component\Mime\Textual\Renderer;

$mimeString = '...';
$parser = new Parser();
$message = $parser->parseMessage($mimeString);

$renderer = new Renderer();
$renderer->renderMessage($message);

[carsonbot]

Thank you for this suggestion.
There has not been a lot of activity here for a while. Would you still like to see this feature?

[jchook]

After posting this I went ahead and wrote a MIME parser/renderer that uses this principle.

It works well and has 100% test coverage, but it's very slow. Perhaps I could publish it as a proof of concept and we could look into the idea more?

[scuben]

Hi @jchook, do you have that parser publicly available to have a look at?

[jchook]

@scuben, just pushed it to GitHub here: https://github.com/jchook/mime-php

[aistis-]

That's a great idea! I also have use case for that.

[carsonbot]

Thank you for this suggestion.
There has not been a lot of activity here for a while. Would you still like to see this feature?

[jchook]

Yes I would

[wouterj]

The next question is: Is anyone up to writing this?

No matter how cool features are, after 2 years we just need someone to write the actual thing. If there is nobody there to do this (which is totally fine - OSS remains a purely motivational driven process), I'm afraid we have to close this as stalled (meaning we do not close it because we reject the feature, but because it doesn't make sense to have stalled features in our very long issue list).

[jchook]

I did write it.

Though I understand this project is rather entrenched and will likely not adopt a major refactor like this.

[aistis-]

@jchook would it be difficult to implement only a Parser feature to the symfony? I ended up using php-mime-mail-parser for parsing and a custom transformer to Symfony's Message