Re: Printing UTF-8 mail to terminal

"Loris Bennett" <loris.bennett@fu-berlin.de> writes:

Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au> writes:
>

On 31Oct2024 16:33, Loris Bennett <loris.bennett@fu-berlin.de> wrote:

I have a command-line program which creates an email containing German
umlauts.  On receiving the mail, my mail client displays the subject and
body correctly:

[...]

So far, so good.  However, when I use the --verbose option to print
the mail to the terminal via
>
 if args.verbose:
     print(mail)
>
I get:
>
 Subject: Übungsbetreff
>
 Sehr geehrter Herr Dr. Bennett,
>
 Dies ist eine =C3=9Cbung.
>
What do I need to do to prevent the body from getting mangled?

>
That looks to me like quoted-printable. This is an encoding for binary
transport of text to make it robust against not 8-buit clean
transports.  So your Unicode text is encodings as UTF-8, and then that
is encoded in quoted-printable for transport through the email system.

>
As I mentioned, I think the problem is to do with the way the salutation
text provided by the "salutation server" and the mail body from a file
are encoded.  This seems to be different. 
>

Your terminal probably accepts UTF-8 - I imagine other German text
renders corectly?

>
Yes, it does.
>

You need to get the text and undo the quoted-printable encoding.
>
If you're using the Python email module to parse (or construct) the
message as a `Message` object I'd expect that to happen automatically.

>
I am using
>
  email.message.EmailMessage
>
as, from the Python documentation
>
  https://docs.python.org/3/library/email.examples.html
>
I gathered that that is the standard approach.
>
And you are right that encoding for the actual mail which is received is
automatically sorted out.  If I display the raw email in my client I get
the following:
>
  Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
  Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
  ...
  Subject: =?utf-8?q?=C3=9Cbungsbetreff?=
  ...
  Dies ist eine =C3=9Cbung.
>
I would interpret that as meaning that the subject and body are encoded
in the same way.
>
The problem just occurs with the unsent string representation printed to
the terminal.

If I log the body like this

  body = f"{salutation},\n\n{text}\n{signature}"
  logger.debug("body: " + body)
 
and look at the log file in my terminal I see

  2024-11-01 09:59:12,318 - DEBUG - mailer:create_body - body: Sehr geehrter Herr Dr. Bennett,

  Dies ist eine Übung.
 
  ...

as expected.  The non-UTF-8 text occurs when I do

  mail = EmailMessage()
  mail.set_content(body, cte="quoted-printable")
  ...

  if args.verbose:  
      print(mail)

which is presumably also correct.

The question is: What conversion is necessary in order to print the
EmailMessage object to the terminal, such that the quoted-printable
parts are turned (back) into UTF-8?

Cheers,

Loris

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