[python-win32] Win32 Python Extensions Outlook.Application Question

[Tim Golden]

Pramod Vaidyanathan wrote:
> The problem comes down to this.  I have an email that I have received in 
> Microsoft Outlook that contains characters outside of the ascii set.  I 
> was able to use your library to traverse through my outlook folders and 
> select the appropriate emails etc.  There are characters in the email 
> that are ascii, extended ascii, and other.  The problem I 
> am having is when I read the "item.Body" into body, the characters 
> "\xe2\x85\x9b", "\xe2\x85\x9c", "\xe2\x85\x9d", "\xe2\x85\x9d" become 
> unknown characters (question marks).  These characters have unicode 
> equivalents of u215b, u215c, u215d, and u215e.  They are the fractions 
> 1/8, 3/8, 5/8, 7/8 respectively. 

I'm not sure whether you're confused or I am.
Just to clarify: the Body attribute of an Outlook
MailItem is returned to Python as a unicode object.

In my case (having sent myself an email containing the
characters you mention) it looks like this:

u'\u215b\u215c\u215d\u215e'

Exactly how these chars will be output will depend on your
console, locale settings etc. If you want to replace
those as decimals, you can simply do this, eg:

body = message.Body.replace (u"\u215b", u"0.125")

You don't need to encode it to anything unless
you have some other reason to do that.

TJG