How to Properly Decode Quoted-Printable .eml Files in Django to Avoid = Artifacts?
I'm working on a Django project where I need to handle .eml
files. The email content often has Quoted-Printable encoding, which causes some characters to be incorrectly displayed. For example, certain characters appear as =
signs or have =
signs inserted within words.
Here’s a sample of what the decoded content looks like:
We request all our =ustomers - For any Remittance please make sure to stay in touch with =ur office Tel no : +97150 267 4240 Mr .Kalpesh. =o:p>
All the Payment =ill be accepted only to East VISON CONTAINER LINE a/c and NOT any of =he personal account.
Also please make =ure to reply the mails only to domain =vcline.com.
We wouldn't be =esponsible for any financial fraud in case bank account is not verified =ith us on whatsapp / WeChat.
As you can see, characters such as "w" and "R" are replaced with =
or the equals sign appears in unexpected places.
What I've Tried:
Standard Decoding of Quoted-Printable: I tried decoding the email content using Python's
quopri
library, but the problem persists.Email Package in Python: I used Python's
email
package to parse the.eml
file and manually decoded the content based on theContent-Transfer-Encoding
header, but the result still contains these artifacts.
import os
import quopri
from email import message_from_bytes
from django.conf import settings
def save_eml_file(self, eml_content):
file_name = f"{self.date_received.strftime('%Y%m%d_%H%M%S')}_{self.id}.eml"
file_path = os.path.join(settings.MEDIA_ROOT, "emails", file_name)
os.makedirs(os.path.dirname(file_path), exist_ok=True)
email_message = message_from_bytes(eml_content)
decoded_content = ""
if email_message.is_multipart():
for part in email_message.walk():
if part.get_content_type() in ["text/plain", "text/html"]:
charset = part.get_content_charset() or "utf-8"
content_transfer_encoding = part.get("Content-Transfer-Encoding", "").lower()
payload = part.get_payload(decode=True) or b""
if content_transfer_encoding == "quoted-printable":
payload = quopri.decodestring(payload)
try:
decoded_content += payload.decode(charset, errors="replace")
except Exception:
decoded_content += str(payload)
else:
charset = email_message.get_content_charset() or "utf-8"
content_transfer_encoding = email_message.get("Content-Transfer-Encoding", "").lower()
payload = email_message.get_payload(decode=True) or b""
if content_transfer_encoding == "quoted-printable":
payload = quopri.decodestring(payload)
try:
decoded_content = payload.decode(charset, errors="replace")
except Exception:
decoded_content = str(payload)
with open(file_path, "w", encoding="utf-8") as file:
file.write(decoded_content)
self.eml_file_path = f"emails/{file_name}"
self.save()
What I Need:
I want to properly decode the email content so that these =
artifacts are removed, and the content displays correctly in both English and non-English (Persian) text. How can I adjust the decoding process to achieve this?
Additional Information:
Django Version: 4.2
Python Version: 3.12
Environment: Windows
I appreciate any suggestions or insights that could help resolve this issue.
From what I can see, the problem has nothing to do with Django, but that your example is not a valid quoted-printable encoding.
[...], may be represented by an "=" followed by a two digit hexadecimal representation of the octet's value. The digits of the hexadecimal alphabet, for this purpose, are "0123456789ABCDEF". [...]