Question

In a test harness, I am trying to verify that a certain identifier appears in an email message. The message has been parsed from a file using Python’s built-in email.message_from_file() method.

When I retrieve the message content using get_payload, it is broken across several lines and includes line continuation markers (the = character as the last character in the line). Unfortunately, the identifier I am looking for is split across a line break.

While I could change the textual part of message to avoid the identifier getting split, I would prefer to find a good mechanism to recombine the continued lines and recover the original string. Can anyone suggest a good way to do so?

Answer 1

>>> s = 'blah blah iden=\ntifier blah blah'
>>> print s
blah blah iden=
tifier blah blah
>>> s.replace('=\n', '')
'blah blah identifier blah blah'
>>> s.replace('=\n', '').find('identifier')
10