Hi Tim, It looks like Mime Encoded Printable text. The library at the following URL may sort you aout:
http://docs.python.org/library/quopri.html Regards, John C. Tim Kersten wrote: > "\xbb" in the charset iso8859-1 (aka latin1) or is this lovely symbol > here, "»". I know this, since I've sent myself an email containing > this little character and used iso8859-1 as the encoding. > > I then download the email using python poplib library. > > *>>>* import poplib > *>>>* mailbox = poplib.POP3_SSL('pop.gmail.com > <http://pop.gmail.com>', port=995) > *>>>* mailbox.user('[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>') > '+OK send PASS' > *>>>* mailbox.pass_('mypassword') > '+OK Welcome.' > *>>>* msg = mailbox.retr(3) # email no. 3 is the relevant email. > *>>>* msg_lines = msg[1] > *>>>* msg_lines[29] # this is the line that contains the "»" > '=BB' > *>>>* len(msg_lines[29]) > 3 > > Instead of =BB I expected to see \xbb. To me, the innocent user of > poplib, I would say there must be a bug there. However, knowing I > don't fully understand all the charset encoding stuff I'm sure poplib > is sound and I'm the one that's mistaken. I've used another mail > client to download the same file and it renders in correctly when the > encoding is set to latin1. > > As far as I can tell, I can't exactly convert "=BB" to another encoding. > > >>> print '\xBB'.decode('latin1') > » > >>> print '=BB'.decode('latin1') > =BB > > I've tried sending utf-8 encoded emails too, but it has the same > result, albeit showing '=C2=BB' instead of '=BB'. What can I do to > successfully decode the email after downloading it with poplib? > > Tim ^,^ > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Python Ireland" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.ie/group/pythonireland?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
