How can I get an email message's text content using Python?

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Given an RFC822 message in Python 2.6, how can I get the right text/plain content part? Basically, the algorithm I want is this:

message = email.message_from_string(raw_message)
if has_mime_part(message, "text/plain"):
    mime_part = get_mime_part(message, "text/plain")
    text_content = decode_mime_part(mime_part)
elif has_mime_part(message, "text/html"):
    mime_part = get_mime_part(message, "text/html")
    html = decode_mime_part(mime_part)
    text_content = render_html_to_plaintext(html)
else:
    # fallback
    text_content = str(message)
return text_content

Of these things, I have get_mime_part and has_mime_part down pat, but I'm not quite sure how to get the decoded text from the MIME part. I can get the encoded text using get_payload(), but if I try to use the decode parameter of the get_payload() method (see the doc) I get an error when I call it on the text/plain part:

File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/
email/message.py", line 189, in get_payload
    raise TypeError('Expected list, got %s' % type(self._payload))
TypeError: Expected list, got <type 'str'>

In addition, I don't know how to take HTML and render it to text as closely as possible.

rfc822 mime email python
3 Answers

To add on @Jarret Hardie's excellent answer:

I personally like to transform that kind of data structures to a dictionary that I can reuse later, so something like this where the content_type is the key and the payload is the value:

import email

[...]

email_message = {
    part.get_content_type(): part.get_payload()
    for part in email.message_from_bytes(raw_email).walk()
}

print(email_message["text/plain"])
user_34316360
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