Decoding Email Subparts with Python’s email.generator.DecodedGenerator Module

DecodedGenerator` module! Let me break it down for you in a way that won’t put you to sleep.

To start: what is an “email subpart”? Well, when you send or receive emails with attachments (like pictures or documents), those attachments are actually separate parts of the email message. Each part has its own headers and content, but they all come together in a neat little package to form the complete email.

Now, let’s say you want to decode one of these subparts so that you can see what it looks like without having to open an attachment or download anything. That’s where `email.generator.DecodedGenerator` comes in! This module provides a class called `DecodedGenerator`, which is similar to the built-in `Generator` class, but instead of printing out the raw content of each subpart (which can be messy and hard to read), it decodes any non-text parts using a template that fills in information about the part.

Here’s an example: let’s say you have an email with an attachment called “my_picture.jpg”. You want to decode this subpart so that you can see what the picture looks like without having to download it or open another program. Here’s how you would do it using `email.generator.DecodedGenerator`:

# Import the necessary modules from the email library
import email
from email import generator, message_from_string

# Load the email content from a file into a string variable
with open('your_email.eml', 'r') as f:
    email_content = f.read()

# Parse the email using `message_from_string` to get an object that represents it
msg = message_from_string(email_content)

# Find the attachment you want to decode (in this case, "my_picture.jpg")
for part in msg.walk():
    # Check if the part has a Content-Disposition header and if the attachment filename matches "my_picture.jpg"
    if 'Content-Disposition' in part.headers and 'attachment; filename="my_picture.jpg"' in part.get_content_type().lower():
        break

# Create a `DecodedGenerator` object to decode the attachment content
# Set mangle_from to False to prevent any changes to the From header
decoder = generator.DecodedGenerator(None, mangle_from=False)

# Feed the attachment data into the decoder using its write method
# Use as_string() to get the attachment data as a string
for line in part.get_payload().as_string():
    decoder.write(line)

# Print out the decoded content (which should be your picture!)
print(decoder.getvalue())

And that’s it! You now have a way to decode email subparts using Python’s `email.generator.DecodedGenerator` module, without having to download or open anything else.

Of course, this is just one example of what you can do with the `email.generator` module there are many other ways to use it for parsing and generating email messages in a variety of formats. But hopefully this tutorial has given you a good starting point!

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