email.encoders: Encoders¶Source code: Lib/email/encoders.py
This module is part of the legacy (Compat32) email API. In the
new API the functionality is provided by the cte parameter of
the set_content() method.
The remaining text in this section is the original documentation of the module.
When creating Message objects from scratch, you often
need to encode the payloads for transport through compliant mail servers. This
is especially true for image/* and text/* type messages
containing binary data.
The email package provides some convenient encodings in its
encoders module. These encoders are actually used by the
MIMEAudio and MIMEImage
class constructors to provide default encodings. All encoder functions take
exactly one argument, the message object to encode. They usually extract the
payload, encode it, and reset the payload to this newly encoded value. They
should also set the Content-Transfer-Encoding header as appropriate.
Note that these functions are not meaningful for a multipart message. They
must be applied to individual subparts instead, and will raise a
TypeError if passed a message whose type is multipart.
Here are the encoding functions provided:
email.encoders.encode_quopri(msg)¶Encodes the payload into quoted-printable form and sets the
Content-Transfer-Encoding header to quoted-printable [1].
This is a good encoding to use when most of your payload is normal printable
data, but contains a few unprintable characters.
email.encoders.encode_base64(msg)¶Encodes the payload into base64 form and sets the
Content-Transfer-Encoding header to base64. This is a good
encoding to use when most of your payload is unprintable data since it is a more
compact form than quoted-printable. The drawback of base64 encoding is that it
renders the text non-human readable.
email.encoders.encode_7or8bit(msg)¶This doesn’t actually modify the message’s payload, but it does set the
Content-Transfer-Encoding header to either 7bit or 8bit as
appropriate, based on the payload data.
email.encoders.encode_noop(msg)¶This does nothing; it doesn’t even set the Content-Transfer-Encoding header.
Footnotes
| [1] | Note that encoding with encode_quopri() also encodes all tabs and space
characters in the data. |