Re: [BUG] git send-email: incorrectly parses email address with comma

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 12, 2018, 09:48 UTC
Message-ID: <20180512094849.GI28279@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <9a35041b-8333-9533-4344-08d6ef99c9c9@gmx.de>

On Sat, May 12, 2018 at 10:21:46AM +0200, Heinrich Schuchardt wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Git send-email allows to combine multiple email addresses in one
> parameter, e.g.
> 
> --to="a@example.com, b@example.com"
> 
> But email addresses may contain commas themselves:
> 
> --to="LASTNAME, firstname <firstname.lastname@example.com>"
> 
> This may lead to an error:

If the name contains syntactically relevant metacharacters, it can be quoted. So as a workaround, you can do:

  --to='"LASTNAME, firstname" <firstname.lastname@example.com>'

I think rfc822 actually requires even names with just spaces in them to be quoted, but git-send-email and most other mail programs are pretty lax about allowing just about anything outside of the <>, so people tend not to bother.

> If the string preceding a comma is not a valid email address do not
> split it off.

That might work as a heuristic, though "is a valid email address" is a notoriously hard thing to check. Possibly looking for an "@" would catch most common cases, though.

-Peff