Python Forum

Hello everyony,

I have a Python-Script which worked fine under Python2 but when I try to run it in Python3 I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "debug2.py", line 49, in <module> sender.sendmail(sendTo, emailSubject, emailContent) File "debug2.py", line 39, in sendmail session.sendmail(GMAIL_USERNAME, recipient, headers + "\r\n\r\n" + content) File "/usr/lib/python3.7/smtplib.py", line 855, in sendmail msg = _fix_eols(msg).encode('ascii') UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 131-133: ordinal not in range(128)

Since Python2 reached it's EOL I wanted to "update" my scripts to Python3 and most of them worked out pretty well.

This is one of my scripts:

#!/usr/bin/env python #-*- coding:utf-8 -*- import smtplib import time f1 = open("../index/mail.txt","r") mail = f1.read() [:-1] f2 = open("../index/passwd.txt","r") passwd = f2.read() [:-1] f3 = open("../index/receiver.txt","r") receiver = f3.read() [:-1] #Email Variables SMTP_SERVER = 'smtp.gmail.com' #Email Server (don't change!) SMTP_PORT = 587 #Server Port (don't change!) GMAIL_USERNAME = mail #change this to match your gmail account GMAIL_PASSWORD = passwd #change this to match your gmail password class Emailer: def sendmail(self, recipient, subject, content): #Create Headers headers = ["From: " + GMAIL_USERNAME, "Subject: " + subject, "To: " + recipient, "MIME-Version: 1.0", "Content-Type: text/html"] headers = "\r\n".join(headers) #Connect to Gmail Server session = smtplib.SMTP(SMTP_SERVER, SMTP_PORT) session.ehlo() session.starttls() session.ehlo() #Login to Gmail session.login(GMAIL_USERNAME, GMAIL_PASSWORD) #Send Email & Exit session.sendmail(GMAIL_USERNAME, recipient, headers + "\r\n\r\n" + content) session.quit sender = Emailer() sendTo = receiver emailSubject = "Subject" emailContent = "ÄÖÜ" #Sends an email to the "sendTo" address with the specified "emailSubject" as the subject and "emailConten$ sender.sendmail(sendTo, emailSubject, emailContent)

I only get the error when I use something like an 'äöü' which is pretty common for the german language. In Python2 I had a similiar issue which I could resolve by using the

coding:utf-8

line in the head. How do you solve this in Python3?

The documentation of smtplib.SMTP.sendmail() says

Quote:msg may be a string containing characters in the ASCII range, or a byte
string. A string is encoded to bytes using the ascii codec, and lone
\r and \n characters are converted to \r\n characters.

As you want to send a string containing characters outside the ASCII range, I suggest that you encode the string manually using another encoding, such as utf8, so try this

msg = (headers + "\r\n\r\n" + content).encode('utf8') session.sendmail(GMAIL_USERNAME, recipient, msg)

(Jul-07-2021, 06:39 PM)Gribouillis Wrote: [ -> ]The documentation of smtplib.SMTP.sendmail() says

Quote:msg may be a string containing characters in the ASCII range, or a byte
string. A string is encoded to bytes using the ascii codec, and lone
\r and \n characters are converted to \r\n characters.

As you want to send a string containing characters outside the ASCII range, I suggest that you encode the string manually using another encoding, such as utf8, so try this

msg = (headers + "\r\n\r\n" + content).encode('utf8') session.sendmail(GMAIL_USERNAME, recipient, msg)

Thanks for your reply.
I edited the ending of my file to this (I hope you meant that).

 #Send Email & Exit msg = (headers + "\r\n\r\n" + content).encode('utf8') session.sendmail(GMAIL_USERNAME, recipient, msg) session.quit sender = Emailer() sendTo = receiver emailSubject = "Subject" emailContent = "ÄÖÜ" #Sends an email to the "sendTo" address with the specified "emailSubject" as the subject and "emailConten$ sender.sendmail(sendTo, emailSubject, emailContent)

When I try to execute it I get the following error:

 File "debug2.py", line 40 msg = (headers + "\r\n\r\n" + content).encode('utf8') ^ TabError: inconsistent use of tabs and spaces in indentation

I don't see the error here tbh.

Make sure the python file is indented with 4 spaces instead of tab characters. You can use the old but excellent reindent command to reindent the program, or a more recent tool such as the black module, or replace the tab characters by 4 space characters with your editor.

Also note that your editor can be configured to enter 4 spaces when you hit the tabulation key. Use this configuration for Python programming.

(Jul-07-2021, 07:03 PM)Gribouillis Wrote: [ -> ]Make sure the python file is indented with 4 spaces instead of tab characters. You can use the old but excellent reindent command to reindent the program, or a more recent tool such as the black module, or replace the tab characters by 4 space characters with your editor.

Also note that your editor can be configured to enter 4 spaces when you hit the tabulation key. Use this configuration for Python programming.

Yeah, of course there was a tab, stupid me
Thanks for the help, now it works

I am using python 3.9.6 still I am getting same issue :

ascii' codec can't encode character '\\xa0' in position 38: ordinal not in range(128)

class SendEmailView(generics.GenericAPIView): def post(self, request): serializer = SendEmailSerializer(data=request.data) if serializer.is_valid(): to_email = serializer.validated_data['to_email'] subject = serializer.validated_data['subject'] message = serializer.validated_data['message'] # Clean non-ASCII characters like \xa0 to_email = to_email subject = subject message = message.encode('utf-8') try: send_mail( subject, message, settings.EMAIL_HOST_USER, [to_email], ) return Response({'detail': 'Email sent successfully'}, status=status.HTTP_200_OK) except Exception as e: error_msg = str(e).encode('utf-8').decode() return Response({'error': error_msg}, status=status.HTTP_500_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR) return Response(serializer.errors, status=status.HTTP_400_BAD_REQUEST)

(Jul-19-2025, 04:26 AM)SagarSwag Wrote: [ -> ]I am using python 3.9.6 still I am getting same issue :

We only have a part of the error message. You could try

error_msg = traceback.format_exc()

to get a more complete error message.

Perhaps the bad character is in the subject of the message? Try encoding the subject.