Strange effects using the email.message.Message class

[Sean DiZazzo]

On Sep 8, 6:23 pm, Rogério Brito <rbr... at ime.usp.br> wrote:
> Dear people,
>
> I am a newbie in Python and I'm just writing a program to rip the HTML parts of
> multipart/alternative e-mails that come with a plain text version.
>
> For this task, I decided to leave perl aside for this task and tried to code
> something in Python using what is already available in the libraries.
>
> Unfortunately, the program that I coded exhibits a strange problem, even if I
> follow what is written on the reference for Python 2.6 (I'm actually running
> Debian GNU/Linux on my system, sid, updated daily).
>
> The strange thing is that I even checked page 500 of "Python Cookbook", by Alex
> Martelli, et. al. and the code in that page is actually quite similar to what I
> wrote.
>
> I'm attaching the program that I've written here, together with a fake e-mail
> that triggers the bug.
>
> The messages that I get, BTW, are the following:
>
> #http://www.python.org/doc/2.5.2/lib/module-email.message.html
> #http://docs.python.org/library/email.message.html
> #
> # Traceback (most recent call last):
> #   File "test.py", line 8, in <module>
> #     print msg.as_string(),
> #   File "/usr/lib/python2.5/email/message.py", line 131, in as_string
> #     g.flatten(self, unixfrom=unixfrom)
> #   File "/usr/lib/python2.5/email/generator.py", line 84, in flatten
> #     self._write(msg)
> #   File "/usr/lib/python2.5/email/generator.py", line 109, in _write
> #     self._dispatch(msg)
> #   File "/usr/lib/python2.5/email/generator.py", line 135, in _dispatch
> #     meth(msg)
> #   File "/usr/lib/python2.5/email/generator.py", line 175, in _handle_text
> #     raise TypeError('string payload expected: %s' % type(payload))
> # TypeError: string payload expected: <type 'list'>
>
> If anybody could help me with the code, I would be very grateful. Also, if you
> can criticize what I wrote, I would be very happy, as I would like to improve my
> Python-fu (which is minimal, unfortunately).
>
> Thanks in advance, Rogério Brito.
>
> --
> Rogério Brito : rbrito@{mackenzie,ime.usp}.br : GPG key 1024D/7C2CAEB8http://www.ime.usp.br/~rbrito:http://meusite.mackenzie.com.br/rbrito
> Projects: algorithms.berlios.de : lame.sf.net : vrms.alioth.debian.org
>
>  drop-alternatives.py
> 1KViewDownload
>
>  triggers-the-problem.mbx.gz
> < 1KViewDownload

You need to modify line 28 to read: body = part.get_payload()

~Sean