email.message_from_file & quoted printable

[Cameron Simpson]

On 24Dec2021 09:31, Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro at gmail.com> wrote:
>Cameron> Try decode=True.
>
>Skip> :dopeslap: Thanks. Never been all that consistent reading documentation.
>
>The more I think about it, the more I think maybe my lack of
>documentation reading wasn't all that unreasonable. The content
>transfer encoding and charset are properties of the message as a
>whole. Iexpected the internal form of the message body to be already
>decoded. Am I missing some key bit of perspective here?

That sometimes you want the raw content as it was in the file? That if 
you have that choice (decoded or raw) the default should be False, as it 
does less?

Aside: a personal design criterion of mine is that default values should 
be False or zero or empty - leaving off an optional parameter _should_ 
be like setting it to "falseish". I'm prepared to reach for a thesaurus 
to achieve that goal.

Returning to the issue: you had a method that gives you the main 
payload. It seemed to be raw. You wanted the decoded form, and thought 
that'd be a pretty common thing to want. So it is well worth a look at 
the function docs to see if that entirely reasonable thing was 
convenient.

That we my _first_ instinct - I've never used get_payload(), myself, and 
I've written my own complete mailfiler :-)

Really, if a function isn't doing what you want you should always read 
the docs for that function specificly, even if you don't want to read 
the entire module docs (which is a big ask).

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs at cskk.id.au>