From: Jesse Rosenthal <jrosenthal@jhu.edu>
To: Sebastian Spaeth <Sebastian@SSpaeth.de>, notmuch@notmuchmail.org
Subject: Re: A tool for printing from notmuch
In-Reply-To: <87r5bvmqgy.fsf@SSpaeth.de>
References: <m162t87p3b.fsf@watt.hwcampus.jhu.edu> <87r5bvmqgy.fsf@SSpaeth.de>
User-Agent: Notmuch/0.5-56-g74cb76a (http://notmuchmail.org) Emacs/23.2.1
	(x86_64-apple-darwin)
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2011 15:09:14 -0500
Message-ID: <m1r5bvmpzp.fsf@watt.hwcampus.jhu.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Precedence: list

Hi Sebastian,

On Sat, 29 Jan 2011 20:58:53 +0100, Sebastian Spaeth <Sebastian@SSpaeth.de> wrote:
> I prefer to not have dependencies outside the std lib in python, but for
> xml/html parsing, there is really nothing appropriate, it seems.

I agree. And I'll admit I mainly chose BeautifulSoup out of
familiarity. But you really can't count on email html being well-formed
-- just vaguely renderable. And you certainly can't count on it being
xhtml. So the built-in parsers wouldn't be of much help. And, in fact,
if someone pastes a Word doc into Outlook, then the MS-specific tags and
styles will even choke libtidy. 

So BS is the best I could find for this job (putting a title into the
header and a table into the top of the body or html that might or might
not even have a header or a body tag). And it's always available in
Debian/Arch/Fedora/ports/MacPorts.

The alternative, since we're trying leaving the email's html alone, is
to do our business with splits and regexes. But that seems like a bad
road to head down.

Best,
Jesse