12.2.10 Iterators

Python PEP

12.2.10 Iterators

Iterating over a message object tree is fairly easy with the Message.walk() method. The email.Iterators module provides some useful higher level iterations over message object trees.

This iterates over all the payloads in all the subparts of msg, returning the string payloads line-by-line. It skips over all the subpart headers, and it skips over any subpart with a payload that isn't a Python string. This is somewhat equivalent to reading the flat text representation of the message from a file using readline(), skipping over all the intervening headers.

Optional decode is passed through to Message.get_payload().

This iterates over all the subparts of msg, returning only those subparts that match the MIME type specified by maintype and subtype.

Note that subtype is optional; if omitted, then subpart MIME type matching is done only with the main type. maintype is optional too; it defaults to text.

Thus, by default typed_subpart_iterator() returns each subpart that has a MIME type of text/*.

The following function has been added as a useful debugging tool. It should not be considered part of the supported public interface for the package.

Prints an indented representation of the content types of the message object structure. For example:

>>> msg = email.message_from_file(somefile)
>>> _structure(msg)
multipart/mixed
    text/plain
    text/plain
    multipart/digest
        message/rfc822
            text/plain
        message/rfc822
            text/plain
        message/rfc822
            text/plain
        message/rfc822
            text/plain
        message/rfc822
            text/plain
    text/plain

Optional fp is a file-like object to print the output to. It must be suitable for Python's extended print statement. level is used internally.

See About this document... for information on suggesting changes.