Our tox.ini makes sure premailer works in:
- Python 2.6
- Python 2.7
- Python 3.3
- Python 3.4
- PyPy
When you send HTML emails you can't use style tags but instead you
have to put inline style attributes on every element. So from this:
<html>
<style type="text/css">
h1 { border:1px solid black }
p { color:red;}
</style>
<h1 style="font-weight:bolder">Peter</h1>
<p>Hej</p>
</html>You want this:
<html>
<h1 style="font-weight:bolder; border:1px solid black">Peter</h1>
<p style="color:red">Hej</p>
</html>premailer does this. It parses an HTML page, looks up style blocks
and parses the CSS. It then uses the lxml.html parser to modify the
DOM tree of the page accordingly.
If you haven't already done so, install premailer first:
$ pip install premailer
Next, the most basic use is to use the shortcut function, like this:
>>> from premailer import transform
>>> print transform("""
... <html>
... <style type="text/css">
... h1 { border:1px solid black }
... p { color:red;}
... p::first-letter { float:left; }
... </style>
... <h1 style="font-weight:bolder">Peter</h1>
... <p>Hej</p>
... </html>
... """)
<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<h1 style="font-weight:bolder; border:1px solid black">Peter</h1>
<p style="color:red">Hej</p>
</body>
</html>
For more advanced options, check out the code of the Premailer class
and all its options in its constructor.
You can also use premailer from the command line by using his main module.
$ python -m premailer -h
usage: python -m premailer [options]
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-f [INFILE], --file [INFILE]
Specifies the input file. The default is stdin.
-o [OUTFILE], --output [OUTFILE]
Specifies the output file. The default is stdout.
--base-url BASE_URL
--remove-internal-links PRESERVE_INTERNAL_LINKS
Remove links that start with a '#' like anchors.
--exclude-pseudoclasses
Pseudo classes like p:last-child', p:first-child, etc
--preserve-style-tags
Do not delete <style></style> tags from the html
document.
--remove-star-selectors
All wildcard selectors like '* {color: black}' will be
removed.
--remove-classes Remove all class attributes from all elements
--strip-important Remove '!important' for all css declarations.
--method METHOD The type of html to output. 'html' for HTML, 'xml' for
XHTML.
--base-path BASE_PATH
The base path for all external stylsheets.
--external-style EXTERNAL_STYLES
The path to an external stylesheet to be loaded.
--disable-basic-attributes DISABLE_BASIC_ATTRIBUTES
Disable provided basic attributes (comma separated)
--disable-validation Disable CSSParser validation of attributes and values
A basic example:
$ python -m premailer --base-url=http://google.com/ -f newsletter.html
<html>
<head><style>.heading { color:red; }</style></head>
<body><h1 class="heading" style="color:red"><a href="http://google.com/">Title</a></h1></body>
</html>
The command line interface supports standard input.
$ echo '<style>.heading { color:red; }</style><h1 class="heading"><a href="/">Title</a></h1>' | python -m premailer --base-url=http://google.com/
<html>
<head><style>.heading { color:red; }</style></head>
<body><h1 class="heading" style="color:red"><a href="http://google.com/">Title</a></h1></body>
</html>
Another thing premailer can do for you is to turn relative URLs (e.g.
"/some/page.html" into "http://www.peterbe.com/some/page.html"). It
does this to all href and src attributes that don't have a ://
part in it. For example, turning this:
<html>
<body>
<a href="/">Home</a>
<a href="page.html">Page</a>
<a href="http://crosstips.org">External</a>
<img src="/folder/">Folder</a>
</body>
</html>Into this:
<html>
<body>
<a href="http://www.peterbe.com/">Home</a>
<a href="http://www.peterbe.com/page.html">Page</a>
<a href="http://crosstips.org">External</a>
<img src="http://www.peterbe.com/folder/">Folder</a>
</body>
</html>by using transform('...', base_url='http://www.peterbe.com/').
Suppose you have a style tag that you don't want to have processed and transformed you can simply set a data attribute on the tag like:
<head>
<style>/* this gets processed */</style>
<style data-premailer="ignore">/* this gets ignored */</style>
</head>That tag gets completely ignored except when the HTML is processed, the
attribute data-premailer is removed.
It works equally for a <link> tag like:
<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="foo.css" data-premailer="ignore">
</head>Certain HTML attributes are also created on the HTML if the CSS
contains any ones that are easily translated into HTML attributes. For
example, if you have this CSS: td { background-color:#eee; } then
this is transformed into style="background-color:#eee" AND as an
HTML attribute bgcolor="#eee".
Having these extra attributes basically as a "back up" for really shit
email clients that can't even take the style attributes. A lot of
professional HTML newsletters such as Amazon's use this.
You can disable some attributes in disable_basic_attributes
To run tox you don't need to have all available Python versions installed because it will only work on those you have. To use tox first install it:
pip install tox
Then simply start it with:
tox