Encoded email headers how to decode in Python

Vladimir

How are you currently reading the files?

Dear Norie

I opened file x=open('message.eml','rb') and asked re module to find "From"
y=x.read()
r1=re.findall(r"^From:(.*)",y,re.M)
print(r1)

And I got =?UTF-8?Q?Martin_Bo=C4=8Dan_ACTIVE24?= + real email

Can you advice?

Thanks
V

=?UTF-8          is an indicator that a UTF string follows.
?Q    means Quoted printable  (?b = base64 encoded).
String,,,
?=                   last part of utf-8is the string.

So in this case you need to decode Quoted printable:   Martin_Bo=C4=8Dan_ACTIVE24....

Quoted printable is any =XX where XX is hexa decimal need to be replaced with hex value.

This may be helpful: https://docs.python.org/2/library/quopri.html

HI noci

thanks a lot for advice. I tried to use email.parser module of standard Python.
with open('message.eml', 'rb') as fp:
    msg = BytesParser(policy=policy.default).parse(fp)
print('From:', msg['from'])

This gave me fully correct name from: Martin Bočan ACTIVE24 <helpdesk@active24.cz>

But I am still in mist with regards decoding.

When I used your advice, i.e. Quoted printable - I decoded via
retezec2=b'Martin_Bo=C4=8Dan_ACTIVE24'
retezec2=quopri.decodestring(retezec2)
print(retezec2)
print(retezec2.decode('utf-8'))
print(retezec2.decode('windows-1250'))

I got
b'Martin_Bo\xc4\x8dan_ACTIVE24'
Martin_Bočan_ACTIVE24
Martin_BoÄŤan_ACTIVE24

You can see that ITF-8 encoding works OK, however I am completely confused with underscore after "n" letter. Why in retezec2.,decode ('utf-8') it is still kept in string, while in previous example of email.parser it is not there. And in Outlook, it is not there as well?

Many thanks

Vladimir

Here is eml file we are discussing about, just in case you want to trymessage.eml