I am displaying new email with IMAP, and everything looks fine, except for one message subject shows as:
=?utf-8?Q?Subject?=
How can I fix it?
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"How can I fix it?" - Why do you assume that it is broken?Tomalak– Tomalak2012-10-15 21:01:22 +00:00Commented Oct 15, 2012 at 21:01
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1It should show just "Subject" - what's inside the =?utf-8?Q? ... ?janeh– janeh2012-10-15 21:02:13 +00:00Commented Oct 15, 2012 at 21:02
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1en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…Tomalak– Tomalak2012-10-15 21:03:15 +00:00Commented Oct 15, 2012 at 21:03
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6 Answers
In MIME terminology, those encoded chunks are called encoded-words. You can decode them like this:
import email.header
text, encoding = email.header.decode_header('=?utf-8?Q?Subject?=')[0]
Check out the docs for email.header for more details.
1 Comment
phihag
In both Python 2 and Python 3,
email.header.decode_header (with lower-case m) is the generic name. In addition, in your code, text is not actually a text, but instead a bytes variable.The text is encoded as a MIME encoded-word. This is a mechanism defined in RFC2047 for encoding headers that contain non-ASCII text such that the encoded output contains only ASCII characters.
In Python 3.3+, the parsing classes and functions in email.parser automatically decode "encoded words" in headers if their policy argument is set to policy.default
>>> import email
>>> from email import policy
>>> msg = email.message_from_file(open('message.txt'), policy=policy.default)
>>> msg['from']
'Pepé Le Pew <[email protected]>'
The parsing classes and functions are:
- email.parser.BytesParser
- email.parser.Parser
- email.message_from_bytes
- email.message_from_binary_file
- email.message_from_string
- email.message_from_file
Confusingly, up to at least Python 3.10, the default policy for these parsing functions is not policy.default, but policy.compat32, which does not decode "encoded words".
>>> msg = email.message_from_file(open('message.txt'))
>>> msg['from']
'=?utf-8?q?Pep=C3=A9?= Le Pew <[email protected]>'
Comments
This is a MIME encoded-word. You can parse it with email.header:
import email.header
def decode_mime_words(s):
return u''.join(
word.decode(encoding or 'utf8') if isinstance(word, bytes) else word
for word, encoding in email.header.decode_header(s))
print(decode_mime_words(u'=?utf-8?Q?Subject=c3=a4?=X=?utf-8?Q?=c3=bc?='))
2 Comments
wbg
Could you rewrite that in a more Pythonic fashion?
phihag
@wbg What's not Pythonic about this code? What would you change? Looking at it now, it seems rather well-written to me, and a paragon of Python's expressiveness. Maybe the generator expression is tripping up @deterjan? If you're just targeting Python 3, you can skip the
if isinstance(word, bytes) else word and the u before the '; this code has been engineered to work on both Python 2 and 3.Try Imbox
Because imaplib is a very excessive low level library and returns results which are hard to work with
Installation
pip install imbox
Usage
from imbox import Imbox
with Imbox('imap.gmail.com',
username='username',
password='password',
ssl=True,
ssl_context=None,
starttls=False) as imbox:
all_inbox_messages = imbox.messages()
for uid, message in all_inbox_messages:
message.subject
1 Comment
Anatoly Alekseev
+1 truly this is for humans. Indeed imbox was able to decode otherwise base64-encoded (in imaplib and the like) subject and other fields on-the-fly. However, be aware if some field is missing the KeyError will be thrown.
In Python 3, decoding this to an approximated string is as easy as:
from email.header import decode_header, make_header
decoded = str(make_header(decode_header("=?utf-8?Q?Subject?=")))
See the documentation of decode_header and make_header.
Comments
High level IMAP lib may be useful here: imap_tools
from imap_tools import MailBox, AND
# get list of email subjects from INBOX folder
with MailBox('imap.mail.com').login('[email protected]', 'pwd', 'INBOX') as mailbox:
subjects = [msg.subject for msg in mailbox.fetch()]
- Parsed email message attributes
- Query builder for searching emails
- Actions with emails: copy, delete, flag, move, seen
- Actions with folders: list, set, get, create, exists, rename, delete, status
- No dependencies
Comments
