HTML email and Python a journey

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HTML email and Python - a journey

• Dave Cranwell.

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Clients
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CampaignMonitor.com/css
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Clients
Booo
No ltstylegt No ltlinkgt
Hiss!
complete crap
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Python to the rescue!
LULZ
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Libraries
Python Package Index http//pypi.python.org

• Beautiful Soup
• Element Soup
• Element Tree
• lXML
• Minidom
• PyQuery

• CSS Utils

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Libraries

• Beautiful Soup
• Element Soup
• Element Tree
• lXML
• Minidom
• PyQuery

• CSS Utils

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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-ht
  ml-parser-performance/

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Introducing...
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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.

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No Google App engine, sadly

• No C libs x
• Pure Python only x
• (and java)
• Piss easy to setup P
• Bloody cool P

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FIN

• Dave Cranwell.
• david_at_torchbox.com