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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)

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`

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