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POHow do you access the message content in the Thunderbird message compose window?
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  1. POHow do you access the message content in the Thunderbird message compose window?
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    copied!<p>I am trying to write a Thunderbird extension which will let you compose a message but it will process the message text before sending it out. So I need access to the plain text content of the email body.</p> <p>Here is what I have so far, just as some test code in the Extension Developer Javascript console.</p> <pre><code>var composer = document.getElementById('msgcomposeWindow'); var frame = composer.getElementsByAttribute('id', 'content-frame').item(0); if(frame.editortype != 'textmail') { print('Sorry, you are not composing in plain text.'); return; } var doc = frame.contentDocument.documentElement; // XXX: This does not work because newlines are not in the string! var text = doc.textContent; print('Message content:'); print(text); print(''); // Do a TreeWalker through the composition window DOM instead. var body = doc.getElementsByTagName('body').item(0); var acceptAllNodes = function(node) { return NodeFilter.FILTER_ACCEPT; }; var walker = document.createTreeWalker(body, NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT | NodeFilter.SHOW_ELEMENT, { acceptNode: acceptAllNodes }, false); var lines = []; var justDidNewline = false; while(walker.nextNode()) { if(walker.currentNode.nodeName == '#text') { lines.push(walker.currentNode.nodeValue); justDidNewline = false; } else if(walker.currentNode.nodeName == 'BR') { if(justDidNewline) // This indicates back-to-back newlines in the message text. lines.push(''); justDidNewline = true; } } for(a in lines) { print(a + ': ' + lines[a]); } </code></pre> <p>I would appreciate any feedback as to whether I'm on the right track. I also have some specific questions:</p> <ul> <li>Does <code>doc.textContent</code> really not have newlines? How stupid is that? I'm hoping it's just a bug with the Javascript console but I suspect not.</li> <li>Is the TreeWalker correct? I first tried <code>NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT</code> but it did not traverse into the <code>&lt;SPAN&gt;</code>s which contain the quoted material in a reply. Similarly, it seems funny to <code>FILTER_ACCEPT</code> every node and then manually cherry-pick it later, but I had the same problem where if I rejected a <code>SPAN</code> node, the walker would not step inside.</li> <li>Consecutive <code>&lt;BR&gt;</code>s break the naive implementation because there is no <code>#text</code> node in between them. So I manually detect them and push empty lines on my array. Is it really necessary to do that much manual work to access the message content?</li> </ul>
 

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