Spaces replaced by =20 after extracting text from email

Question

I tried to get the text of a received gmail, using the email and imaplib modules in python. After decoding with utf-8 and after getting the payload of the message, all the spaces are still replaced by =20. Can I use another decoding step in order to fix this?

The code is the following: (I got it from a youtube tutorial - https://youtu.be/Jt8LizzxkPU )

``

import email
import imaplib



username = "abc"
password = "123"

mail = imaplib.IMAP4_SSL("imap.gmail.com")
mail.login(username,password)

mail.select("inbox")

result, data = mail.uid("search", None,"ALL")

inbox_item_list = data[0].split()

for item in inbox_item_list:
    #most_recent = inbox_item_list[-1]
    #oldest = inbox_item_list[0]

    result2, email_data = mail.uid('fetch',item,'(RFC822)') 

    raw_email = email_data[0][1].decode("utf-8")

    email_message = email.message_from_string(raw_email)

    to_ = email_message['To']
    from_ = email_message['From']
    subject_ = email_message['Subject']

    counter = 1
    for part in email_message.walk():
        if part.get_content_maintype() == "multipart":
            continue
        filename = part.get_filename()
        if not filename:
            ext = ".html"
            filename = "msg-part-%08d%s" %(counter, ext)
        counter += 1   

    #save file
    content_type = part.get_content_type()
    print(subject_)
    print (content_type)
    if "plain" in content_type:
        print(part.get_payload())
    elif "html" in content_type:
        print("do some beautiful soup")
    else:
        print(content_type)

``

Answer 1

Try to import quopri, and then when you get the content of the email body (or whatever text that has the =20s inside), you can use quopri.decodestring()

I do it like this

quopri.decodestring(part.get_payload())

But do keep in mind that this is if you quite specifically want to decode from quoted-printable. Normally I would say the answer of @jfs is neater.