There are two formats of news articles:
A " and " B. A format is obsolete,
but
looks like this:
Aarticle-ID
newsgroups
path
date
title
Body of article
A
Bformat
article consists of a series of header lines
(collectively referred to as the message
header ), followed by an empty line,
followed by the body.
A header
line must begin with a word
(consisting of alphanumerics and dashes),
a colon,
and at least one space,
in that order.
This is a specialisation of RFC 822 format.
Continued headers are as per RFC 822.
Unrecognized headers are ignored.
News is stored in the same format transmitted,
see ``Standard for the Interchange of USENET Messages''
(RFC 1036 nee 850)
and
``Standard for the Format of ARPA Internet Text Messages''
(RFC 822, but note amendments in RFC 1123)
for a full description.
The following headers are among those recognized:
From: Newsgroups: "news groups" Message-ID: < Unique RFC822 message-id > Subject: descriptive title Date: date posted Expires: expiration date Reply-To: address for mail replies References: "Message-ID of article this is a follow-up to" . Control: text of a control message A
"news batch" consists of zero or more articles,
each preceded by a line of the form
#! rnews byte-count where
byte-count is the number of bytes in the following article,
where each newline is counted as a single byte,
even if it is stored as a CR-LF or
some other representation.
Spaces are significant:
one before and one after
rnews . News batches are usually transmitted
compress ed. Various peculiar optional encapsulations of news batches exist
which consist of doing something to the
(probably compressed)
batch,
then prepending a
#! goo line to the output,
where
goo reflects the form of encapsulation;
known values of
goo include
cunbatch (the null encapsulation),
and
c7unbatch (encode the batch using only seven bits per character).
EXAMPLES
An article.
Path: att!eagle!jerry
From: jerry@eagle.uucp (Jerry Schwarz)
Newsgroups: news.announce
Subject: Usenet Etiquette -- Please Read
Message-ID: <642@eagle.UUCP>
Date: Friday, 19 Nov 82 16:14:55 EST
Followup-To: news.misc
Expires: Saturday, 1 Jan 83 00:00:00 EST
Organization: Bell Labs, Murray Hill
The body of the article comes here, after an empty line.
