writing an email.message.Message in UTF-8

[Adam Funk]

I'm trying to write an instance of email.message.Message, whose body
contains unicode characters, to a UTF-8 file.  (Python 2.7.3 & 2.7.10
again.)

    reply = email.message.Message()
    reply.set_charset('utf-8')
    ... # set various headers
    reply.set_payload('\n'.join(body_lines) + '\n')
    ...
    outfile = codecs.open(outfilename, 'w', encoding='utf-8', errors='ignore')
    outfile.write(reply.as_string())
    outfile.close()

Then reply.as_string() barfs a UnicodeDecodeError.  I look in the
documentation, which says the generator is better.  So I replace the
outfile.write(...) line with the following:

    g = email.generator.Generator(outfile, mangle_from_=False)
    g.flatten(reply)

which still barfs a UnicodeDecodeError.  Looking closer at the first
error, I see that the exception was in g.flatten(...) already & thrown
up to reply.as_string().  How can I force the thing to do UTF-8
output?

Thanks.


-- 
      $2.95!
 PLATE O' SHRIMP
Luncheon Special