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I am reading text from two different .txt files and concatenating them together. Then add that to a body of the email through by using webbrowser.

One text file is English characters (ascii) and the other Japanese (UTF-8). The text will display fine if I write it to a text file. But if I use webbrowser to insert the text into an email body the Japanese text displays as question marks.

I have tried running the script on multiple machines that have different mail clients as their defaults. Initially I thought maybe that was the issue, but that does not appear to be. Thunderbird and Mail (MacOSX) display question marks. 

Hello. Today is 2014-05-09

????????????????2014-05-09????

I have looked at similar issues around on SO but they have not solved the issue.

Is there a way to have the Japanese (UTF-8) display in the body of an email created with webbrowser in python? I could use the email functionality but the requirement is the script needs to open the default mail client and insert all the information.

The code and text files I am using are below. I have simplified it to focus on the issue.

email-template.txt

Hello. Today is {{date}}

email-template-jp.txt

こんにちは。今日は {{date}} です。

Python Script

#
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#

import sys
import re
import os
import glob
import webbrowser
import codecs,sys

sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter('utf8')(sys.stdout)

# vars
date_range = sys.argv[1:][0]

email_template_en   = "email-template.txt"
email_template_jp   = "email-template-jp.txt"   
email_to_send       = "email-to-send.txt"       # finished email is saved here

# Default values for the composed email that will be opened
mail_list           = "test@test.com"
cc_list             = "test1@test.com, test2@test.com"
subject             = "Email Subject"

# Open email templates and insert the date from the parameters sent in
try:
    f_en = open(email_template_en, "r")
    f_jp = codecs.open(email_template_jp, "r", "UTF-8")
    try:
        email_content_en = f_en.read()
        email_content_jp = f_jp.read()

        email_en = re.sub(r'{{date}}', date_range, email_content_en) 
        email_jp = re.sub(r'{{date}}', date_range, email_content_jp).encode("UTF-8") 
        # this throws an error
        # UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe3 in position 26: ordinal not in range(128)
        # email_en_jp = (email_en + email_jp).encode("UTF-8") 
        email_en_jp = (email_en + email_jp)
    finally:
        f_en.close()
        f_jp.close()
    pass
except Exception, e:
    raise e

# Open the default mail client and fill in all the information
try:
    f = open(email_to_send, "w")
    try:
        f.write(email_en_jp)
        # Does not send Japanese text to the mail client. But will write to the .txt file fine. Unsure why.
        webbrowser.open("mailto:%s?subject=%s&cc=%s&body=%s" %(mail_list, subject, cc_list, email_en_jp), new=1) # open mail client with prefilled info
    finally:
        f.close()
    pass
except Exception, e:
    raise e

edit: Forgot to add I am using Python 2.7.1

Community
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tokyovariable
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    I think email content that isn't pure ASCII must be encoded as [MIME](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME), probably using BASE64. – Mark Ransom May 09 '14 at 03:39

1 Answers1

3

EDIT 2: Found a workable solution after all.

Replace your webbrowser call with this.

import subprocess
[... other code ...]
arg = "mailto:%s?subject=%s&cc=%s&body=%s" % (mail_list, subject, cc_list, email_en_jp)
subprocess.call(["open", arg])

This will open your default email client on MacOS. For other OSes please replace "open" in the subprocess line with the proper executable.

EDIT: I looked into it a bit more and Mark's comment above made me read the RFC (2368) for mailto URL scheme.

The special hname "body" indicates that the associated hvalue is the
body of the message. The "body" hname should contain the content for
the first text/plain body part of the message. The mailto URL is
primarily intended for generation of short text messages that are
actually the content of automatic processing (such as "subscribe"
messages for mailing lists), not general MIME bodies.

And a bit further down:

8-bit characters in mailto URLs are forbidden. MIME encoded words (as defined in [RFC2047]) are permitted in header values, but not for any part of a "body" hname."

So it looks like this is not possible as per RFC, although that makes me question why the JavaScript solution in the JSFiddle provided by naota works at all.

I leave my previous answer as is below, although it does not work.

I have run into same issues with Python 2.7.x quite a couple of times now and every time a different solution somehow worked.

So here are several suggestions that may or may not work, as I haven't tested them.

a) Force unicode strings:

webbrowser.open(u"mailto:%s?subject=%s&cc=%s&body=%s" % (mail_list, subject, cc_list, email_en_jp), new=1)

Notice the small u right after the opening ( and before the ".

b) Force the regex to use unicode:

email_jp = re.sub(ur'{{date}}', date_range, email_content_jp).encode("UTF-8") 
# or maybe
email_jp = re.sub(ur'{{date}}', date_range, email_content_jp)

c) Another idea regarding the regex, try compiling it first with the re.UNICODE flag, before applying it.

pattern = re.compile(ur'{{date}}', re.UNICODE)

d) Not directly related, but I noticed you write the combined text via the normal open method. Try using the codecs.open here as well.

f = codecs.open(email_to_send, "w", "UTF-8")

Hope this helps.

daniel
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