extra dashes in PGP-related blocks?

[Andrew Brown]

>> From: Jonathan Rochkind
>
>When people have been posting their public keys, or encrypted address
>blocks, to various lists I'm on, all of the "-----BEGIN whatever..." lines
>seem to have a "- " preppended to them. So, for instance, they look like:
>
>- -----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
>Version: 2.6.2
>[stuff]
>- -----END PGP MESSAGE-----
>
>I'm guessing if I really sent a block like that to a remailer, the remailer
>would hork because of the prepended "- "s.  I know that sometimes people's
>public keys they've posted to a list look like that, and when I try to add
>them to PGP, it horks, and I've got to go into a text editor and remove the
>"- ", and then add it to my keyring.
>
>Does anyone know what it is that's putting in these "- "s, why it's putting
>them in, and how to stop it?

pgp is putting those extra "- " pieces in (guess you didn't read all
your pgp docs :-),  it does that so that it can tell the difference between
pgp begin/end blocks and other stuff, kinda like sendmail "quoting" lines
beginning with a dot with an extra dot.  the difference here is that
sendmail removes any leading dots before delivery and pgp doesn't after
removing a signature.  yeah, you do have to load it into an editor but
mailing something to a remailer shoud not "hork" it.  the pgp running on
the remailer will just "- " the stuff and include it literally.

follow?

-- 
--< "CYBERBOY" >--
andrew at ml.com (Andrew Brown)
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