HTML email and Python - a journey Dave Cranwell

HTML email and Python - a journey

Dave Cranwell.

ClientsDesktop Web

Outlook (03,07)Windows MailMac MailEntourage (04,08)ThunderbirdAOL (9,10,Mac)NotesEudora

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Dave Cranwell. HTML email and Python – a journey

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ClientsDesktop Web

Outlook (03,07,10)Windows MailMac MailEntourage (04,08)ThunderbirdAOL (9,10,Mac)NotesEudora

Yahoo (old, new)Gmail (old, new)Windows Live mailHotmailAOL WebMobileMe

Booo

Hiss!

No <style> No <link>

complete crap

Python to the rescue!


LULZ

Libraries

• Beautiful Soup– Element Soup

• Element Tree• lXML• Minidom• PyQuery


• CSS Utils

Python Package Index: http://pypi.python.org

Libraries

• Beautiful Soup– Element Soup

• Element Tree• lXML• Minidom• PyQuery


• CSS Utils

lXML

• Pythonic binding of libxml2 (C)• up to 20 X faster than Beautiful Soup at

parsing *• Includes CSSSelect, which converts a CSS 2.1

selector into an Xpath

* http://blog.ianbicking.org/2008/03/30/python-html-parser-performance/


Introducing...


Whats happening?• lXML parses HTML and converts to an eTree• CSSUtils parses CSS rules into objects• Loop over CSS rules converting each to XPath

with CSSSelect• Create CSSStyleDeclaration for each element

affected by a CSS rule– Contains details of the tag as well as the combined

styles applied• Loop over eTree and serialised matching

CSSStyleDeclarations into the “style” attribute.


No Google App engine, sadly

• No C libs x• Pure Python only x– (and java)

• Piss easy to setup • Bloody cool


FIN

Dave [email protected]

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HTML email and Python - a journey Dave Cranwell