How can I get an email message's text content using Python?

Question

Given an RFC822 message in Python 2.6, how can I get the right text/plain content part? Basically, the algorithm I want is this:

message = email.message_from_string(raw_message) if has_mime_part(message, "text/plain"):     mime_part = get_mime_part(message, "text/plain")     text_content = decode_mime_part(mime_part) elif has_mime_part(message, "text/html"):     mime_part = get_mime_part(message, "text/html")     html = decode_mime_part(mime_part)     text_content = render_html_to_plaintext(html) else:     # fallback     text_content = str(message) return text_content 

Of these things, I have get_mime_part and has_mime_part down pat, but I'm not quite sure how to get the decoded text from the MIME part. I can get the encoded text using get_payload(), but if I try to use the decode parameter of the get_payload() method (see the doc) I get an error when I call it on the text/plain part:

File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/ email/message.py", line 189, in get_payload     raise TypeError('Expected list, got %s' % type(self._payload)) TypeError: Expected list, got <type 'str'> 

In addition, I don't know how to take HTML and render it to text as closely as possible.

Answer 1

In a multipart e-mail, email.message.Message.get_payload() returns a list with one item for each part. The easiest way is to walk the message and get the payload on each part:

import email msg = email.message_from_string(raw_message) for part in msg.walk():     # each part is a either non-multipart, or another multipart message     # that contains further parts... Message is organized like a tree     if part.get_content_type() == 'text/plain':         print part.get_payload() # prints the raw text 

For a non-multipart message, no need to do all the walking. You can go straight to get_payload(), regardless of content_type.

msg = email.message_from_string(raw_message) msg.get_payload() 

If the content is encoded, you need to pass None as the first parameter to get_payload(), followed by True (the decode flag is the second parameter). For example, suppose that my e-mail contains an MS Word document attachment:

msg = email.message_from_string(raw_message) for part in msg.walk():     if part.get_content_type() == 'application/msword':         name = part.get_param('name') or 'MyDoc.doc'         f = open(name, 'wb')         f.write(part.get_payload(None, True)) # You need None as the first param                                               # because part.is_multipart()                                                # is False         f.close() 

As for getting a reasonable plain-text approximation of an HTML part, I've found that html2text works pretty darn well.

Answer 2

Flat is better than nested ;)

from email.mime.multipart import MIMEMultipart assert isinstance(msg, MIMEMultipart)  for _ in [k.get_payload() for k in msg.walk() if k.get_content_type() == 'text/plain']:     print _