How to copy the entire outlook message content in python

Tue Dec 29 12:07:06 EST 2020

On Tue, 29 Dec 2020 05:38:53 -0800 (PST), nikhil k wrote:
...[snip]...
> import win32com.client as win32  
>
> ########### Functions
> def getMailBody(msgFile):
>     start_text = "<html>"
>     end_text = "</html>"
>     with open(msgFile) as f:
>         data=f.read()
>     return data[data.find(start_text):data.find(end_text)+len(end_text)]
...[snip]...
>
>
> Below is the error I'm getting.
>==============================================
>   File "C:\Python\Python38-32\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 23, in decode
>     return codecs.charmap_decode(input,self.errors,decoding_table)[0]
> UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x81 in position 924: character maps to <undefined>

I'm not completely sure that it's the f.read() call that produces
the error, because you cut out the earlier lines of the error
message, but . . .

I think the problem is that the data in the file you're reading
do not represent a valid "encoding" of any character string,
using whatever encoding convention Python thinks you want to use.
Maybe Python is assuming you're using ASCII encoding; 0x81 is
certainly not a valid ASCII character.

I don't know how Outlook represents messages in its .msg files;
it's possible it packs ASCII text along with binary data.

Maybe you can find a Python package that reads .msg files.

Maybe you could read the file as a bytestring instead of as a
character string.

-- 
To email me, substitute nowhere->runbox, invalid->com.