[Python-Dev] [PEPs] Email addresses in PEPs? (original) (raw)

Trent Mick trentm at activestate.com
Sat Sep 8 00:37:55 CEST 2007

David Goodger wrote:

On 8/20/07, Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:

I believe email addresses are automatically obfuscated as part of the HTML generation process, but one of the PEP editors can correct me if I am wrong. Yes, email addresses are obfuscated in PEPs. For example, in PEPs 0 & 12, my address is encoded as "goodger at python.org" (the "@" is changed to " at " and further obfuscated from there). More tricks could be played, but that would only decrease the usefulness of addresses for legitimate purposes.

If some would find it useful, here is a snippet of code that obfuscates email addresses for HTML as done by Markdown (a text-to-html markup translator). It randomly encodes each charater as a hex or decimal HTML entity (roughly 10% raw, 45% hex, 45% dec).

The email still appears normally in the browser, but is pretty obtuse when slicing and dicing the raw HTML.

Would others find this useful in pep2html.py?

from random import random

def _encode_email_address(self, addr): # Input: an email address, e.g. "foo at example.com" # # Output: the email address as a mailto link, with each character # of the address encoded as either a decimal or hex entity, in # the hopes of foiling most address harvesting spam bots. E.g.: # # foo@exa # mple.com # # Based on a filter by Matthew Wickline, posted to the BBEdit-Talk # mailing list: <http://tinyurl.com/yu7ue> chars = [_xml_encode_email_char_at_random(ch) for ch in "mailto:" + addr] # Strip the mailto: from the visible part. addr = '%s'
% (''.join(chars), ''.join(chars[7:])) return addr

def _xml_encode_email_char_at_random(ch): r = random() # Roughly 10% raw, 45% hex, 45% dec. # '@' must be encoded. I [John Gruber] insist. if r > 0.9 and ch != "@": return ch elif r < 0.45: # The [1:] is to drop leading '0': 0x63 -> x63 return '&#%s;' % hex(ord(ch))[1:] else: return '&#%s;' % ord(ch)

-- Trent Mick trentm at activestate.com

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