Missing dashes in ASCII Armor

[Anonymous]

Several newbies have sent me mail with one
missing '-' in the ASCII Armor "BEGIN PGP MESSAGE"
header.  This seems to happen when they are sloppy
with a cut and paste.

The error message generated is:
> gpg: no valid OpenPGP data found.
> gpg: processing message failed: eof

I had to figure out what was going on by watching
what gpg is doing in the debugger.  No ordinary
user could ever determine what was causing this
problem - the application would seem to fail
intermittently for mysterious reasons.

Of course, the missing '-' makes it an invalid
header, but this seems to be a common error, so
detecting a line which looks a lot like a header
line and suggesting that might be a problem will
probably help a lot of users.  Also, it's the kind
of problem that causes people to give up using
the program out of frustration.

GPG Fan

P.S. There is already a similar check which
recognizes quoted-printable format and gives a
great error.  This has helped me find the problem
instantly many times - otherwise it would have
been back to the debugger!