Question

I’m using the mail gem from https://github.com/mikel/mail

I use it to parse raw mail data: e.g

require 'mail'

maildata = Mail.new(body) #where body is the raw text of an email message

#from there I can see info such as
p maildata.body.decoded #displays the decoded email body
p maildata.from #shows who the email is from

How would I figure out whether the email is plaintext or html is there a built in way to do this?

Answer 1

You could look at maildata.content_type:

maildata.content_type
#=> "text/plain; charset=us-ascii"

If it’s a multipart e-mail, you could have both plain text and HTML. You could then look at the parts array to see which content types it includes:

maildata.content_type
#=> "multipart/alternative; boundary=\"--==_mimepart_4f848491e618f_7e4b6c1f3849940\"; charset=utf-8"

maildata.parts.collect { |part| part.content_type }
#=> ["text/plain; charset=utf-8", "text/html; charset=utf-8"]