Internationalised email subjects

[bugmagnet]

I am writing a simple email program in Python that will send out
emails containing Chinese characters in the message subject and body.
I am not having any trouble getting the email body displayed correctly
in Chinese inside the email client, however the email subject and
sender name (which are also in Chinese) are garbled and are not
displayed correctly in the email client.

Here is the code snippet:

writer = MimeWriter.MimeWriter(out)
headers = {"From": senderName + ' <' + senderName + '>', "To":
recipientEmail, "Reply-to": senderEmail}

writer.addheader("Subject", subject)
writer.addheader("MIME-Version", "1.0")
writer.addheader('From', headers['From'])
writer.addheader('To', headers['To'])
writer.addheader('Reply-to', headers['Reply-to'])

I'm quite new to Python (and programming in general) and am having a
hard time wrapping my head around the internationalization functions
of Python, so was hoping someone could point me in the right
direction.  Is there a different method I need to use in order for
the  sender name and subject to be displayed correctly?  Is there an
extra step I am missing?  Some sample code would be very helpful.

Thanks!

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Re: Internationalised email subjects

[bugmagnet]

Thanks Martin, I actually have read that page before.  The part that
confuses me is the line:

h = Header('p\xf6stal', 'iso-8859-1')

I have tried using:

h = Header('  ', 'GB2312')

but when I run the code, I get the following error:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'gb2312' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-3:
illegal multibyte sequence

Is there something I need to do in order to encode the Chinese
characters into the GB2312 character set?

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Re: Internationalised email subjects

[bugmagnet]

Seems some characters are missing from my last post.  The line that
says:

h = Header('  ', 'GB2312')

should say:

h = Header('  ', 'GB2312')


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Re: Internationalised email subjects

[bugmagnet]

That's really strange.  The chinese characters I am inputing into the
post are not being displayed.  Basically, what I am doing is this:

h = Header('(Some Chinese characters inserted here', 'GB2312')

And when I run this code, I receive the following error message:

UnicodeDecodeError: 'gb2312' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-3:
illegal multibyte sequence

Any idea what I may be doing wrong?  How do I convert Chinese
characters into something like p\xf6stal in the original code posted
by Martin?  Can someone point me in the right direction?  I'm not even
sure what class/method to look into for this.

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Re: Internationalised email subjects

[bugmagnet]

Thanks Martin,

The "Some Chinese characters" are loaded from a MySQL table and are
encoded in GB2312 format.

I've added the following line at the top of the code:

# -*- coding: GB2312 -*-

I've also added the following line into the code:

h = Header(subject.encode('GB2312'), 'GB2312')

Note that the 'subject' variable consists of GB2312 encoded text, so I
am not sure if it is necessary to call the subject.encode('GB2312')
method.  When I try to execute this code, I get the following error:

File "/home/web88/html/app/test.py", line 17,
in Header(subject.encode('GB2312'), 'GB2312')
LookupError: unknown encoding: GB2312

Any idea what may be wrong?


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Re: Internationalised email subjects

[bugmagnet]

Thanks Richie,

I've tried removing the encode('GB2312') line, so the code looks like
this:

h = Header(subject, 'GB2312')

However, this line still causes the following error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/web88/html/app/sendmail.py", line 314, in
h = Header(subject, 'GB2312')
File "/usr/lib/python2.2/email/Header.py", line 188, in __init__
self.append(s, charset, errors)
File "/usr/lib/python2.2/email/Header.py", line 272, in append
ustr = unicode(s, incodec, errors)
LookupError: unknown encoding: gb2312 )

Any ideas?

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Re: Internationalised email subjects

[bugmagnet]

I'm an idiot!  Gabriel, you're right!  Turns out the ISP was running
Python 2.3, which has known issues with the GB2312 codec.  They've
upgraded to 2.4 and now everything runs smoothly!

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