[Python-Dev] headers api for email package

[Chris Withers]

Barry Warsaw wrote:
>  >>> message['Subject']
> 
> The raw bytes or the decoded unicode?

A header object.

> Okay, so you've picked one.  Now how do you spell the other way?

str(message['Subject'])
bytes(message['Subject'])

> Now, setting headers.  Sometimes you have some unicode thing and 
> sometimes you have some bytes.  You need to end up with bytes in the 
> ASCII range and you'd like to leave the header value unencoded if so.  
> But in both cases, you might have bytes or characters outside that 
> range, so you need an explicit encoding, defaulting to utf-8 probably.
> 
>  >>> Message.set_header('Subject', 'Some text', encoding='utf-8')
>  >>> Message.set_header('Subject', b'Some bytes')

Where you just want "a damned valid email and stop making my life hard!":

Message['Subject']='Some text'

Where you care about what encoding is used:

Message['Subject']=Header('Some text',encoding='utf-8')

If you have bytes, for whatever reason:

Message['Subject']=b'some bytes'.decode('utf-8')

...because only you know what encoding those bytes use!

> One of those maps to
> 
>  >>> message['Subject'] = ???

...should only accept text or a Header object.

Chris

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