Creating an appropriate MIME application with Python

Question

I found this snippet in official examples

   if maintype == 'text':
        fp = open(path)
        # Note: we should handle calculating the charset
        msg = MIMEText(fp.read(), _subtype=subtype)
        fp.close()
    elif maintype == 'image':
        fp = open(path, 'rb')
        msg = MIMEImage(fp.read(), _subtype=subtype)
        fp.close()
    elif maintype == 'audio':
        fp = open(path, 'rb')
        msg = MIMEAudio(fp.read(), _subtype=subtype)
        fp.close()
    else:
        fp = open(path, 'rb')
        msg = MIMEBase(maintype, subtype)
        msg.set_payload(fp.read())
        fp.close()
        # Encode the payload using Base64
        encoders.encode_base64(msg)

I need exactly this function: add any file to the email.

I want to avoid this long part of if-elif-elif, as it looks redundant to me.

Is there a general way to connect any data to email?

In my case, “all kinds of data” means:

• The file is less than two megabytes long.
• Mime type can be guessed mimetypes.guess_type()

Answer 1

Is there a general way to connect any data to email?

You can get rid of the first cases and save MIMEBase, which is the base (i.e. general) class for MIME types.

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