Python imaplib: Display non-ASCII characters correctly - python

I am using Python 3.5 and imaplib to fetch an e-mail from GMail and print its body. The body contains non-ASCII characters.
These are 'encoded' in a strange way and I cannot find out how to fix this.
import email
import imaplib
c = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL('imap.gmail.com')
c.login('example#gmail.com', 'password')
c.select('Inbox')
_, data = c.fetch(b'12345', '(RFC822)')
mail = data[0][1]
message = email.message_from_bytes(mail)
payload = message.get_payload()
body = mail[0].as_string()
print(body)
Gives
>> ... Mit freundlichen Gr=C3=BC=C3=9Fen ...
instead of the desired
>> ... Mit freundlichen Grüßen ...
It looks to me like this is not an issue of encoding but one of conversion. But how do I tell Python to convert the characters correctly? Is there a more convenient library?

The text is encoded with quoted-printable encoding, which is a way to encode non-ascii characters in ascii text. You can decode it using python's quopri module.
>>> import quopri
>>> bs = b'Gr=C3=BC=C3=9Fen'
>>> # Decode quoted-printable to raw bytes.
>>> utf8 = quopri.decodestring(bs)
>>> # Decode bytes to text.
>>> s = utf8.decode('utf-8')
>>> print(s)
Grüßen
You may find that quoted-printable is the value of the email's content-transfer-encoding header.

Related

'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 10-12: ordinal not in range(128) [duplicate]

I need to fetch data from a URL with non-ascii characters but urllib2.urlopen refuses to open the resource and raises:
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u0131' in position 26: ordinal not in range(128)
I know the URL is not standards compliant but I have no chance to change it.
What is the way to access a resource pointed by a URL containing non-ascii characters using Python?
edit: In other words, can / how urlopen open a URL like:
http://example.org/Ñöñ-ÅŞÇİİ/
Strictly speaking URIs can't contain non-ASCII characters; what you have there is an IRI.
To convert an IRI to a plain ASCII URI:
non-ASCII characters in the hostname part of the address have to be encoded using the Punycode-based IDNA algorithm;
non-ASCII characters in the path, and most of the other parts of the address have to be encoded using UTF-8 and %-encoding, as per Ignacio's answer.
So:
import re, urlparse
def urlEncodeNonAscii(b):
return re.sub('[\x80-\xFF]', lambda c: '%%%02x' % ord(c.group(0)), b)
def iriToUri(iri):
parts= urlparse.urlparse(iri)
return urlparse.urlunparse(
part.encode('idna') if parti==1 else urlEncodeNonAscii(part.encode('utf-8'))
for parti, part in enumerate(parts)
)
>>> iriToUri(u'http://www.a\u0131b.com/a\u0131b')
'http://www.xn--ab-hpa.com/a%c4%b1b'
(Technically this still isn't quite good enough in the general case because urlparse doesn't split away any user:pass# prefix or :port suffix on the hostname. Only the hostname part should be IDNA encoded. It's easier to encode using normal urllib.quote and .encode('idna') at the time you're constructing a URL than to have to pull an IRI apart.)
In python3, use the urllib.parse.quote function on the non-ascii string:
>>> from urllib.request import urlopen
>>> from urllib.parse import quote
>>> chinese_wikipedia = 'http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:' + quote('首页')
>>> urlopen(chinese_wikipedia)
Python 3 has libraries to handle this situation. Use
urllib.parse.urlsplit to split the URL into its components, and
urllib.parse.quote to properly quote/escape the unicode characters
and urllib.parse.urlunsplit to join it back together.
>>> import urllib.parse
>>> url = 'http://example.com/unicodè'
>>> url = urllib.parse.urlsplit(url)
>>> url = list(url)
>>> url[2] = urllib.parse.quote(url[2])
>>> url = urllib.parse.urlunsplit(url)
>>> print(url)
http://example.com/unicod%C3%A8
It is more complex than the accepted #bobince's answer suggests:
netloc should be encoded using IDNA;
non-ascii URL path should be encoded to UTF-8 and then percent-escaped;
non-ascii query parameters should be encoded to the encoding of a page URL was extracted from (or to the encoding server uses), then percent-escaped.
This is how all browsers work; it is specified in https://url.spec.whatwg.org/ - see this example. A Python implementation can be found in w3lib (this is the library Scrapy is using); see w3lib.url.safe_url_string:
from w3lib.url import safe_url_string
url = safe_url_string(u'http://example.org/Ñöñ-ÅŞÇİİ/', encoding="<page encoding>")
An easy way to check if a URL escaping implementation is incorrect/incomplete is to check if it provides 'page encoding' argument or not.
Based on #darkfeline answer:
from urllib.parse import urlsplit, urlunsplit, quote
def iri2uri(iri):
"""
Convert an IRI to a URI (Python 3).
"""
uri = ''
if isinstance(iri, str):
(scheme, netloc, path, query, fragment) = urlsplit(iri)
scheme = quote(scheme)
netloc = netloc.encode('idna').decode('utf-8')
path = quote(path)
query = quote(query)
fragment = quote(fragment)
uri = urlunsplit((scheme, netloc, path, query, fragment))
return uri
For those not depending strictly on urllib, one practical alternative is requests, which handles IRIs "out of the box".
For example, with http://bücher.ch:
>>> import requests
>>> r = requests.get(u'http://b\u00DCcher.ch')
>>> r.status_code
200
Encode the unicode to UTF-8, then URL-encode.
Use iri2uri method of httplib2. It makes the same thing as by bobin (is he/she the author of that?)
Another option to convert an IRI to an ASCII URI is to use furl package:
gruns/furl: 🌐 URL parsing and manipulation made easy. - https://github.com/gruns/furl
Python's standard urllib and urlparse modules provide a number of URL
related functions, but using these functions to perform common URL
operations proves tedious. Furl makes parsing and manipulating URLs
easy.
Examples
Non-ASCII domain
http://国立極地研究所.jp/english/ (Japanese National Institute of Polar Research website)
import furl
url = 'http://国立極地研究所.jp/english/'
furl.furl(url).tostr()
'http://xn--vcsoey76a2hh0vtuid5qa.jp/english/'
Non-ASCII path
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/日本語 ("Japanese" article in Wikipedia)
import furl
url = 'https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/日本語'
furl.furl(url).tostr()
'https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E'
works! finally
I could not avoid from this strange characters, but at the end I come through it.
import urllib.request
import os
url = "http://www.fourtourismblog.it/le-nuove-tendenze-del-marketing-tenere-docchio/"
with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as file:
html = file.read()
with open("marketingturismo.html", "w", encoding='utf-8') as file:
file.write(str(html.decode('utf-8')))
os.system("marketingturismo.html")

Python, scrapy : bad utf8 characters writed in file from scraped html page with charset iso-8859-1

I want to scrap a webpage with charset iso-8859-1 with Scrapy, in python 2.7. The text i'm interesting in on the webpage is : tempête
Scrapy returns response as an UTF8 unicode with characters correctly encoded :
>>> response
u'temp\xc3\xaate'
Now, I want to write the word tempête in a file, so I'm doing the following :
>>> import codecs
>>> file = codecs.open('test', 'a', encoding='utf-8')
>>> file.write(response) #response is the above var
When I open the file, the resulting text is tempête. It seems that python does not detect proper encoding and can't read the two bytes encoded char and thinks it's two one-coded char.
How can I handle this simple use case ?
In your example, response is a (decoded) Unicode string with \xc3\xa inside, then something is wrong at scrapy encoding detection level.
\xc3\xa is character ê encoded as UTF-8, so you should only see those character for (encoded) non-Unicode/str strings (in Python 2 that is)
Python 2.7 shell session:
>>> # what your input should look like
>>> tempete = u'tempête'
>>> tempete
u'temp\xeate'
>>> # UTF-8 encoded
>>> tempete.encode('utf-8')
'temp\xc3\xaate'
>>>
>>> # latin1 encoded
>>> tempete.encode('iso-8859-1')
'temp\xeate'
>>>
>>> # back to your sample
>>> s = u'temp\xc3\xaate'
>>> print s
tempête
>>>
>>> # if you use a non-Unicode string with those characters...
>>> s_raw = 'temp\xc3\xaate'
>>> s_raw.decode('utf-8')
u'temp\xeate'
>>>
>>> # ... decoding from UTF-8 works
>>> print s_raw.decode('utf-8')
tempête
>>>
Something is wrong with Scrapy interpreting page as iso-8859-1 encoded.
You can force the encoding by re-building a response from response.body:
>>> import scrapy.http
>>> hr1 = scrapy.http.HtmlResponse(url='http://www.example', body='<html><body>temp\xc3\xaate</body></html>', encoding='latin1')
>>> hr1.body_as_unicode()
u'<html><body>temp\xc3\xaate</body></html>'
>>> hr2 = scrapy.http.HtmlResponse(url='http://www.example', body='<html><body>temp\xc3\xaate</body></html>', encoding='utf-8')
>>> hr2.body_as_unicode()
u'<html><body>temp\xeate</body></html>'
>>>
Build a new reponse
newresponse = response.replace(encoding='utf-8')
and work with newresponse instead
You need to encode your response as iso-8859-1 first and then decode (convert) it to utf-8 before writing to a file opened as utf-8
response = u'temp\xc3\xaate'
r1 = response.encode('iso-8859-1')
r2 = r1.decode('utf-8')
Interesting read: http://farmdev.com/talks/unicode/

Trailing equal signs (=) in emails

I download messages from a Gmail account using POP3 and save them in a SQLite database for futher processing:
mailbox = poplib.POP3_SSL('pop.gmail.com', '995')
mailbox.user(user)
mailbox.pass_(password)
msgnum = mailbox.stat()[0]
for i in range(msgnum):
msg = '\n'.join(mailbox.retr(i+1)[1])
save_message(msg, dbmgr)
mailbox.quit()
However, looking in the database, all lines but the last one of the message body (payload) have trailing equal signs. Do you know why this happens?
Frederic's link lead me to the answer. The encoding is called "quoted printable" (wiki) and it's possible to decode it using the quopri Python module (documentation):
msg.decode('quopri').decode('utf-8')
Update for python 3.x
You now have to invoke the codecs module.
import codecs
bytes_msg = bytes(msg, 'utf-8')
decoded_msg = codecs.decode(bytes_msg, 'quopri').decode('utf-8')

Unable to display Japanese (UTF-8) characters in email body with webbrowser

I am reading text from two different .txt files and concatenating them together. Then add that to a body of the email through by using webbrowser.
One text file is English characters (ascii) and the other Japanese (UTF-8). The text will display fine if I write it to a text file. But if I use webbrowser to insert the text into an email body the Japanese text displays as question marks.
I have tried running the script on multiple machines that have different mail clients as their defaults. Initially I thought maybe that was the issue, but that does not appear to be. Thunderbird and Mail (MacOSX) display question marks.
Hello. Today is 2014-05-09
????????????????2014-05-09????
I have looked at similar issues around on SO but they have not solved the issue.
UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in
position 20: ordinal not in
range(128)
Japanese in python function
Printing out Japanese (Chinese) characters
python utf-8 japanese
Is there a way to have the Japanese (UTF-8) display in the body of an email created with webbrowser in python? I could use the email functionality but the requirement is the script needs to open the default mail client and insert all the information.
The code and text files I am using are below. I have simplified it to focus on the issue.
email-template.txt
Hello. Today is {{date}}
email-template-jp.txt
こんにちは。今日は {{date}} です。
Python Script
#
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#
import sys
import re
import os
import glob
import webbrowser
import codecs,sys
sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter('utf8')(sys.stdout)
# vars
date_range = sys.argv[1:][0]
email_template_en = "email-template.txt"
email_template_jp = "email-template-jp.txt"
email_to_send = "email-to-send.txt" # finished email is saved here
# Default values for the composed email that will be opened
mail_list = "test#test.com"
cc_list = "test1#test.com, test2#test.com"
subject = "Email Subject"
# Open email templates and insert the date from the parameters sent in
try:
f_en = open(email_template_en, "r")
f_jp = codecs.open(email_template_jp, "r", "UTF-8")
try:
email_content_en = f_en.read()
email_content_jp = f_jp.read()
email_en = re.sub(r'{{date}}', date_range, email_content_en)
email_jp = re.sub(r'{{date}}', date_range, email_content_jp).encode("UTF-8")
# this throws an error
# UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe3 in position 26: ordinal not in range(128)
# email_en_jp = (email_en + email_jp).encode("UTF-8")
email_en_jp = (email_en + email_jp)
finally:
f_en.close()
f_jp.close()
pass
except Exception, e:
raise e
# Open the default mail client and fill in all the information
try:
f = open(email_to_send, "w")
try:
f.write(email_en_jp)
# Does not send Japanese text to the mail client. But will write to the .txt file fine. Unsure why.
webbrowser.open("mailto:%s?subject=%s&cc=%s&body=%s" %(mail_list, subject, cc_list, email_en_jp), new=1) # open mail client with prefilled info
finally:
f.close()
pass
except Exception, e:
raise e
edit: Forgot to add I am using Python 2.7.1
EDIT 2: Found a workable solution after all.
Replace your webbrowser call with this.
import subprocess
[... other code ...]
arg = "mailto:%s?subject=%s&cc=%s&body=%s" % (mail_list, subject, cc_list, email_en_jp)
subprocess.call(["open", arg])
This will open your default email client on MacOS. For other OSes please replace "open" in the subprocess line with the proper executable.
EDIT: I looked into it a bit more and Mark's comment above made me read the RFC (2368) for mailto URL scheme.
The special hname "body" indicates that the associated hvalue is the
body of the message. The "body" hname should contain the content for
the first text/plain body part of the message. The mailto URL is
primarily intended for generation of short text messages that are
actually the content of automatic processing (such as "subscribe"
messages for mailing lists), not general MIME bodies.
And a bit further down:
8-bit characters in mailto URLs are forbidden. MIME encoded words (as
defined in [RFC2047]) are permitted in header values, but not for any
part of a "body" hname."
So it looks like this is not possible as per RFC, although that makes me question why the JavaScript solution in the JSFiddle provided by naota works at all.
I leave my previous answer as is below, although it does not work.
I have run into same issues with Python 2.7.x quite a couple of times now and every time a different solution somehow worked.
So here are several suggestions that may or may not work, as I haven't tested them.
a) Force unicode strings:
webbrowser.open(u"mailto:%s?subject=%s&cc=%s&body=%s" % (mail_list, subject, cc_list, email_en_jp), new=1)
Notice the small u right after the opening ( and before the ".
b) Force the regex to use unicode:
email_jp = re.sub(ur'{{date}}', date_range, email_content_jp).encode("UTF-8")
# or maybe
email_jp = re.sub(ur'{{date}}', date_range, email_content_jp)
c) Another idea regarding the regex, try compiling it first with the re.UNICODE flag, before applying it.
pattern = re.compile(ur'{{date}}', re.UNICODE)
d) Not directly related, but I noticed you write the combined text via the normal open method. Try using the codecs.open here as well.
f = codecs.open(email_to_send, "w", "UTF-8")
Hope this helps.

Python char encoding

I have the following code :
msgtxt = "é"
msg = MIMEText(msgtxt)
msg.set_charset('ISO-8859-1')
msg['Subject'] = "subject"
msg['From'] = "from#mail.com"
msg['To'] = "to#mail.com"
serv.sendmail("from#mail.com","to#mail.com", msg.as_string())
The e-mail arrive with é as its body instead of the expected é
I have tried :
msgtxt = "é".encode("ISO-8859-1")
msgtxt = u"é"
msgtxt = unicode("é", "ISO-8859-1")
all yield the same result.
How to make this work?
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks in advance, J.
msgtxt = "é"
msg.set_charset('ISO-8859-1')
Well, what's the encoding of the source file containing this code? If it's UTF-8, which is a good default choice, just writing the é will have given you the two-byte string '\xc3\xa9', which, when viewed as ISO-8859-1, looks like é.
If you want to use non-ASCII byte string literals in your source file without having to worry about what encoding the text editor is saving it as, use a string literal escape:
msgtxt = '\xE9'
# coding: utf-8 (or whatever you want to save your source file in)
msgtxt = u"é"
msg = MIMEText(msgtxt,_charset='ISO-8859-1')
Without the u the text will be in the source encoding. As a Unicode string, msgtxt will be encoded in the indicated character set.

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