Extracting plain/text and html body from MBOX file to a list

Question

I'm trying extract the body of email messages from a mbox file (previously converted from PST format).

I took the base function from another [slack question] (Extracting the body of an email from mbox file, decoding it to plain text regardless of Charset and Content Transfer Encoding). It work well for extracting the 'plain/text' body content, but I also wanted to extract the 'html' content.

From the last part of the code, which call the function to extract the body, I´ve tried modifying it to store the text and html strings in separate lists.

import mailbox

def getcharsets(msg):
    charsets = set({})
    for c in msg.get_charsets():
        if c is not None:
            charsets.update([c])
    return charsets

def handleerror(errmsg, emailmsg, cs):
    print()
    print(errmsg)
    print("This error occurred while decoding with ",cs," charset.")
    print("These charsets were found in the one email.",getcharsets(emailmsg))
    print("This is the subject:",emailmsg['subject'])
    print("This is the sender:",emailmsg['From'])

def getbodyfromemail(msg):
    body = 'no_text'
    body_html = 'no_html'
    #Walk through the parts of the email to find the text body.    
    if msg.is_multipart():    
        for part in msg.walk():

            # If part is multipart, walk through the subparts.            
            if part.is_multipart(): 

                for subpart in part.walk():
                    if subpart.get_content_type() == 'text/plain':
                        # Get the subpart payload (i.e the message body)
                        body = subpart.get_payload(decode=True) 
                        #charset = subpart.get_charset()
                    elif subpart.get_content_type() == 'html':
                        body_html = subpart.get_payload(decode=True)
                        #body_html = subpart.get_payload(decode=True)

            # Part isn't multipart so get the email body
            elif part.get_content_type() == 'text/plain':
                body = part.get_payload(decode=True)
                #charset = part.get_charset()

    # If this isn't a multi-part message then get the payload (i.e the message body)
    elif msg.get_content_type() == 'text/plain':
        body = msg.get_payload(decode=True) 

   # No checking done to match the charset with the correct part. 
    for charset in getcharsets(msg):
        try:
            body = body.decode(charset)
        except UnicodeDecodeError:
            handleerror("UnicodeDecodeError: encountered.",msg,charset)
        except AttributeError:
             handleerror("AttributeError: encountered" ,msg,charset)
    return body, body_html

mboxfile = 'Bandeja de entrada'
body = []
body_html = []
for thisemail in mailbox.mbox(mboxfile):
    body = body.append(getbodyfromemail(thisemail)[0])
    body_html = body_html.append(getbodyfromemail(thisemail)[1])
    print(body_html)

But right now, is giving me an error: AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'append' I expected the output of:

body = [string, string, string]
body_html = [html, html, html]

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 15 '21 at 21:31

Your code works for me, except you should replace the list appends with the following:

for thisemail in mailbox.mbox(mboxfile):
    body.append(getbodyfromemail(thisemail)[0])
    body_html.append(getbodyfromemail(thisemail)[1])
    print(body_html)

Python list append works in place, so it returns None. You could also replace the list appends with e.g.:

body = body + [getbodyfromemail(thisemail)[0]]

Extracting plain/text and html body from MBOX file to a list

1 Answers1