Re: email-style italics

[Paul Lagasse pglagasse@xxxxxxxx]

Bill Troop wrote:
I guess there would be no point in a program that searched for the
first _, replaced it with e.g. , searched for the second,
replaced it with e.g. ? That was my first thought coming back
to this but the problem is that it would miss out any unbalanced pairs.
Yeah, most pairs probably would be balanced, but every now and then they
wouldn't (or you might get two underscores in a row); you'd also need to
watch out for underscore characters in email and web addresses.
So maybe a program that focused only on "[S]_[S]" strings first and
asked for input, then autoconverted underscores based on [S]_ and _[S],
and then checked for broken IT-ON IT-OFF pairs would mostly work.
Such a system would still mistake a string of underscores used to
represent a blank or something else -- google offered up 147,000,000
examples of "__", so I'm sure it'd occur in an email.

Paul Lagasse