[Tutor] Fixing garbled email addresses

[Dotan Cohen]

On 01/05/07, Daniel Yoo <dyoo at cs.wpi.edu> wrote:
> Hi Dotan,
>
>
> Just for reference, the weirdness that you're seeing before the email
> addresses in your text file are "MIME-encoded" strings.
>
>      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME
>
> Concretely, the string
>
>      "=?UTF-8?B?157XqNeZ15Qg15nXoNeY16bXnw==?="
>
> is an encoding of a string in MIME format, and in particular, a utf-8
> string in base-64 format.

Actually, I did realize that.

> (See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html for details on
> unicode if you need to brush up.)
>
>
> There are libraries in Python to help decode this stuff.  In particular,
> the 'email' library.
>
>      http://docs.python.org/lib/module-email.header.html

I will look into that, thanks.

> ###################################################
> >>> from email.header import decode_header
> >>> from email.header import make_header
> >>> s = "=?UTF-8?B?157XqNeZ15Qg15nXoNeY16bXnw==?="
> >>> h = make_header(decode_header(s))
> ###################################################
>
>
> At this point, h is a "Header" object, whose unicode characters are:
>
> #########################################################
> >>> unicode(h)
> u'\u05de\u05e8\u05d9\u05d4 \u05d9\u05e0\u05d8\u05e6\u05df'
> #########################################################
>
> I have a console that supports printing utf-8, and when I look at this, it
> looks like Hebrew.  A direct letter-for-letter transliteration would be:
>
>      "Mem" "Resh" "Yod" "He" "Yod" "Nun" "Tet" "Tsadi" "Final Nun"
>
> I'm sure these consonants make more sense to you than they do to me, since
> I don't speak Hebrew.  In any case, the point is that you may be able to
> maintain the name-to-email correspondence in your email lists by using
> Python's support for decoding those base64-encoded strings.
>

There should be a space between the "he" and the second "yod", but
that is correct. Thanks.

Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com/what_is/computer.html
http://hlup.com