email: Representing character sets
This module provides a class Charset for representing character sets
and character set conversions in email messages, as well as a character set
registry and several convenience methods for manipulating this registry.
Instances of Charset are used in several other modules within the
email package.
Import this class from the email.charset module.
New in version 2.2.2.
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class email.charset.Charset([input_charset])
Map character sets to their email properties.
This class provides information about the requirements imposed on email for a
specific character set. It also provides convenience routines for converting
between character sets, given the availability of the applicable codecs. Given
a character set, it will do its best to provide information on how to use that
character set in an email message in an RFC-compliant way.
Certain character sets must be encoded with quoted-printable or base64 when used
in email headers or bodies. Certain character sets must be converted outright,
and are not allowed in email.
Optional input_charset is as described below; it is always coerced to lower
case. After being alias normalized it is also used as a lookup into the
registry of character sets to find out the header encoding, body encoding, and
output conversion codec to be used for the character set. For example, if
input_charset is iso-8859-1, then headers and bodies will be encoded using
quoted-printable and no output conversion codec is necessary. If
input_charset is euc-jp, then headers will be encoded with base64, bodies
will not be encoded, but output text will be converted from the euc-jp
character set to the iso-2022-jp character set.
Charset instances have the following data attributes:
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input_charset
- The initial character set specified. Common aliases are converted to
their official email names (e.g. latin_1 is converted to
iso-8859-1). Defaults to 7-bit us-ascii.
- If the character set must be encoded before it can be used in an email
header, this attribute will be set to Charset.QP (for
quoted-printable), Charset.BASE64 (for base64 encoding), or
Charset.SHORTEST for the shortest of QP or BASE64 encoding. Otherwise,
it will be None.
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body_encoding
- Same as header_encoding, but describes the encoding for the mail
message’s body, which indeed may be different than the header encoding.
Charset.SHORTEST is not allowed for body_encoding.
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output_charset
- Some character sets must be converted before they can be used in email headers
or bodies. If the input_charset is one of them, this attribute will
contain the name of the character set output will be converted to. Otherwise, it will
be None.
-
input_codec
- The name of the Python codec used to convert the input_charset to
Unicode. If no conversion codec is necessary, this attribute will be
None.
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output_codec
- The name of the Python codec used to convert Unicode to the
output_charset. If no conversion codec is necessary, this attribute
will have the same value as the input_codec.
Charset instances also have the following methods:
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get_body_encoding()
Return the content transfer encoding used for body encoding.
This is either the string quoted-printable or base64 depending on
the encoding used, or it is a function, in which case you should call the
function with a single argument, the Message object being encoded. The
function should then set the Content-Transfer-Encoding
header itself to whatever is appropriate.
Returns the string quoted-printable if body_encoding is QP,
returns the string base64 if body_encoding is BASE64, and
returns the string 7bit otherwise.
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convert(s)
- Convert the string s from the input_codec to the output_codec.
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to_splittable(s)
Convert a possibly multibyte string to a safely splittable format. s is
the string to split.
Uses the input_codec to try and convert the string to Unicode, so it can
be safely split on character boundaries (even for multibyte characters).
Returns the string as-is if it isn’t known how to convert s to Unicode
with the input_charset.
Characters that could not be converted to Unicode will be replaced with
the Unicode replacement character 'U+FFFD'.
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from_splittable(ustr[, to_output])
Convert a splittable string back into an encoded string. ustr is a
Unicode string to “unsplit”.
This method uses the proper codec to try and convert the string from
Unicode back into an encoded format. Return the string as-is if it is not
Unicode, or if it could not be converted from Unicode.
Characters that could not be converted from Unicode will be replaced with
an appropriate character (usually '?').
If to_output is True (the default), uses output_codec to convert
to an encoded format. If to_output is False, it uses input_codec.
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get_output_charset()
Return the output character set.
This is the output_charset attribute if that is not None, otherwise
it is input_charset.
- Return the length of the encoded header string, properly calculating for
quoted-printable or base64 encoding.
Header-encode the string s.
If convert is True, the string will be converted from the input
charset to the output charset automatically. This is not useful for
multibyte character sets, which have line length issues (multibyte
characters must be split on a character, not a byte boundary); use the
higher-level Header class to deal with these issues (see
email.header). convert defaults to False.
The type of encoding (base64 or quoted-printable) will be based on the
header_encoding attribute.
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body_encode(s[, convert])
Body-encode the string s.
If convert is True (the default), the string will be converted from
the input charset to output charset automatically. Unlike
header_encode(), there are no issues with byte boundaries and
multibyte charsets in email bodies, so this is usually pretty safe.
The type of encoding (base64 or quoted-printable) will be based on the
body_encoding attribute.
The Charset class also provides a number of methods to support
standard operations and built-in functions.
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__str__()
- Returns input_charset as a string coerced to lower
case. __repr__() is an alias for __str__().
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__eq__(other)
- This method allows you to compare two Charset instances for
equality.
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__ne__(other)
- This method allows you to compare two Charset instances for
inequality.
The email.charset module also provides the following functions for adding
new entries to the global character set, alias, and codec registries:
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email.charset.add_charset(charset[, header_enc[, body_enc[, output_charset]]])
Add character properties to the global registry.
charset is the input character set, and must be the canonical name of a
character set.
Optional header_enc and body_enc is either Charset.QP for
quoted-printable, Charset.BASE64 for base64 encoding,
Charset.SHORTEST for the shortest of quoted-printable or base64 encoding,
or None for no encoding. SHORTEST is only valid for
header_enc. The default is None for no encoding.
Optional output_charset is the character set that the output should be in.
Conversions will proceed from input charset, to Unicode, to the output charset
when the method Charset.convert() is called. The default is to output in
the same character set as the input.
Both input_charset and output_charset must have Unicode codec entries in the
module’s character set-to-codec mapping; use add_codec() to add codecs the
module does not know about. See the codecs module’s documentation for
more information.
The global character set registry is kept in the module global dictionary
CHARSETS.
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email.charset.add_alias(alias, canonical)
Add a character set alias. alias is the alias name, e.g. latin-1.
canonical is the character set’s canonical name, e.g. iso-8859-1.
The global charset alias registry is kept in the module global dictionary
ALIASES.
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email.charset.add_codec(charset, codecname)
Add a codec that map characters in the given character set to and from Unicode.
charset is the canonical name of a character set. codecname is the name of a
Python codec, as appropriate for the second argument to the unicode()
built-in, or to the encode() method of a Unicode string.
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