On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 11:10 PM Karsten Hilbert <karsten.hilb...@gmx.net> wrote: > > > Because of this, the Python 3 str type is not suitable to store an email > > message, since it insists on the string being Unicode encoded, > > I should greatly appreciate to be enlightened as to what > a "string being Unicode encoded" is intended to say ? >
A Python 3 "str" or a Python 2 "unicode" is an abstract sequence of Unicode codepoints. As such, it's not suitable for transparently round-tripping an email, as it would lose information about the way that things were encoded. However, it is excellent for building and processing emails - you deal with character encodings at the same point where you deal with the RFC 822 header format. In the abstract, your headers might be stored in a dict, but then you encode them to a flat sequence of bytes by putting "Header: value", wrapping correctly - and also encode the text into bytes at the same time. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list