email with a non-ascii charset in Python3 ?

[Helmut Jarausch]

Hi,

I'm sorry to ask such a FAQ but still I couldn't find an answer - neither in the docs nor the web.

What's wrong with the following script?

Many thanks for a hint,
Helmut.

#!/usr/bin/python3
#_*_ coding: latin1 _*_

import smtplib
from email.message import Message
import datetime

msg= Message()
msg.set_charset('latin-1')
msg['Subject'] = "*** Email Test ***"
msg['From'] = "Email_Tester at numa-sv.igpm.rwth-aachen.de"
msg['To']   = "jarausch at igpm.rwth-aachen.de"
msg['Date'] = datetime.datetime.utcnow().strftime('%m/%d/%Y %I:%M:%S %p')

server= smtplib.SMTP("igpm.igpm.rwth-aachen.de")
msg.set_payload("Gedanken über einen Test","iso-8859-1")

## I have tried msg.set_payload("Gedanken über einen Test".encode("iso-8859-1"),"iso-8859-1")
## which fails, as well

server.send_message(msg)
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "./Test_EMail_Py3.py", line 17, in <module>
      server.send_message(msg)
    File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/smtplib.py", line 812, in send_message
      g.flatten(msg_copy, linesep='\r\n')
    File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/email/generator.py", line 91, in flatten
      self._write(msg)
    File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/email/generator.py", line 137, in _write
      self._dispatch(msg)
    File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/email/generator.py", line 163, in _dispatch
      meth(msg)
    File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/email/generator.py", line 396, in _handle_text
      super(BytesGenerator,self)._handle_text(msg)
    File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/email/generator.py", line 201, in _handle_text
      self.write(payload)
    File "/usr/lib64/python3.2/email/generator.py", line 357, in write
      self._fp.write(s.encode('ascii', 'surrogateescape'))
  UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xfc' in position 9: ordinal not in range(128)
server.quit()



This is Python 3.2.4 (GIT 20120805)