there's a secondary issue here, why in the world would you auto split a monetary value across a numeric decimal indicator? why would you split lines at all for this use case?
So a message intended to be sent by an SMTP client:
DATA
Hello customer,<br>[978 characters] 27.00
Was erroneously formated into:
DATA
Hello customer,<br>[978 characters] 27
.00
.
The period after 27 will be removed. And this is how the html will be rendered.
Hello customer,
[Lots of text] 2700
so splitting 27.00 on the . becomes 27 00, because the CRLF is significant to the client.
you would want to split at whitespace, not at any other character -- unless you had a 999+ string of non-whitespace of course.
perhaps the author didn't know or didn't realize or thought it insignificant to his point that in addition there was a quoted-printable encoding, in which case i believe the trailing/mandatory CRLF can be made non significant for client rendering. personally i still would have split on actual whitespace. (well, i wouldn't have written an smtp client in the first place.)
And, they also state that the period disappeared because it was placed at the start of the next line when the split occurred.
From which one can deduce that they were doing the most basic "split" possible, splitting at the exact 1000 octet point, i.e. something like:
if (length(line)>1000) then:
line1=string_range(line,0,999)
line2=string_range(line,1000,end)
fi
> The maximum total length of a text line including the <CRLF> is 1000