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Robin Meis
Robin Meis

Reputation: 31

Python3 IMAP search special characters

I would like to find a note over IMAP using Python3 and it's IMAP extension. I try to search for a subject which contains special chars as in the example below. Is there a way I can encode the search string to be IMAP compatible?

self.connection.search(None, 'ALL', 'SUBJECT "büro"')

returns

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xfc' in position 10: ordinal not in range(128)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2674

Answers (2)

Sergey
Sergey

Reputation: 31

If there are special characters in search string, than literal must be used according to https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3501#page-54. Python imaplib does not do it for search command. So need to use workaround:

    imap.literal = subject.encode('UTF-8')
    status, data = imap.uid('SEARCH', 'CHARSET UTF-8 SUBJECT')
    # fetch is also must be used via uid command after this

without uid version:

    imap.literal = subject.encode('UTF-8')
    typ, dat = imap._simple_command('SEARCH', "CHARSET UTF-8 SUBJECT")
    status, data = imap._untagged_response(typ, dat, 'SEARCH')

Upvotes: 0

user1370351
user1370351

Reputation: 21

You should pass UTF-8 encoded string as the search argument and also need to mention "CHARSET UTF-8" in the search query.

some thing like this UID SEARCH CHARSET utf-8 "search string". Here "search string" should be utf-8 encoded.

Upvotes: 2

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