Tony Nelson writes: > OK, Header instances could have a .useful field that returned the useful > data in all instances. But in any case, the email package should guide > users in the correct usage, rather than leaving every choice seeming equal, > when only one choice is correct.
What do you mean by "only one choice is correct?" For example, a Destination field might be used for presentation (in which case the display name are needed), or to compose a list of recipients (when thjey should be discarded). Some applications might prefer to receive the combination as the original string (although that often is not valid RFC-any), others might prefer it parsed into a pair of display name and mailbox. Quoth Barry Warsaw: > >A good API for getting the parsed and decoded header values needs to > >take into account that it won't always be a string. For unstructured > >headers like Subject, str(header) would work just fine. For an > >Originator or Destination address, what does str(header) return? A string (not folded) of comma-separated addresses in "Display Name" <p...@box.example.com> form. > >And what would be the API for getting the set of > >realname/addresses out of the header? Does there need to be one? An AddressHeader object could support indexing: message['To'][0] returns the first displayname,mailbox pair. If you really want a list, what's wrong with list(header)? (Yes, I recall that you (Barry) said you don't think subclassing worked very well, but I wonder if maybe we can't get it righter this time around.) > msg[<headername>] would be the preferred way. This goes against the principle that this returns a Header object. For one thing, I really think that there need to be some common methods all Header objects support, like str() and to_wire_format(). Also, if this returns a list for 'To', then str(msg['To']) won't work right: it will return the list enclosed in square brackets and the mailbox portions will be quoted, which isn't useful. > msg.get_header(<headername>).useful would return the useful data form of > any header. Er, shouldn't we just throw away the data that is never useful?<wink> > msg.get_header(<headername>).addresses would return the address list from > any address Header, and raise AttributeError with other Headers. Yes, but a list of what? Strings? Bytes? Displayname/mailbox pairs? _______________________________________________ Email-SIG mailing list Email-SIG@python.org Your options: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/email-sig/archive%40mail-archive.com
