Skip to main content

Turns CSS blocks into style attributes

Project description

premailer
=========

[![Travis](https://travis-ci.org/peterbe/premailer.png?branch=master)](https://travis-ci.org/peterbe/premailer)


Turns CSS blocks into style attributes
--------------------------------------

When you send HTML emails you can't used 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.

Getting started
---------------

If you havena'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.
--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>

Turning relative URLs into absolute URLs
----------------------------------------

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/')`.


HTML attributes created additionally
------------------------------------

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`

Project details


Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

premailer-2.1.3.tar.gz (18.5 kB view hashes)

Uploaded Source

Supported by

AWS AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Datadog Monitoring Fastly Fastly CDN Google Google Download Analytics Microsoft Microsoft PSF Sponsor Pingdom Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Sentry Error logging StatusPage StatusPage Status page