#4661: add bytes parsing and generation to email (email version bump to 5.1.0)
The work on this is not 100% complete, but everything is present to
allow real-world testing of the code. The only remaining major todo
item is to (hopefully!) enhance the handling of non-ASCII bytes in headers
converted to unicode by RFC2047 encoding them rather than replacing them with
'?'s.
diff --git a/Doc/library/email.rst b/Doc/library/email.rst
index d3f1908..8926ae4 100644
--- a/Doc/library/email.rst
+++ b/Doc/library/email.rst
@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
email messages, including MIME documents.
.. moduleauthor:: Barry A. Warsaw <barry@python.org>
.. sectionauthor:: Barry A. Warsaw <barry@python.org>
-.. Copyright (C) 2001-2007 Python Software Foundation
+.. Copyright (C) 2001-2010 Python Software Foundation
The :mod:`email` package is a library for managing email messages, including
@@ -92,6 +92,44 @@
+---------------+------------------------------+-----------------------+
| :const:`4.0` | Python 2.5 | Python 2.3 to 2.5 |
+---------------+------------------------------+-----------------------+
+| :const:`5.0` | Python 3.0 and Python 3.1 | Python 3.0 to 3.2 |
++---------------+------------------------------+-----------------------+
+| :const:`5.1` | Python 3.2 | Python 3.0 to 3.2 |
++---------------+------------------------------+-----------------------+
+
+Here are the major differences between :mod:`email` version 5.1 and
+version 5.0:
+
+* It is once again possible to parse messages containing non-ASCII bytes,
+ and to reproduce such messages if the data containing the non-ASCII
+ bytes is not modified.
+
+* New functions :func:`message_from_bytes` and :func:`message_from_binary_file`,
+ and new classes :class:`~email.parser.BytesFeedParser` and
+ :class:`~email.parser.BytesParser` allow binary message data to be parsed
+ into model objects.
+
+* Given bytes input to the model, :meth:`~email.message.Message.get_payload`
+ will by default decode a message body that has a
+ :mailheader:`Content-Transfer-Encoding` of `8bit` using the charset specified
+ in the MIME headers and return the resulting string.
+
+* Given bytes input to the model, :class:`~email.generator.Generator` will
+ convert message bodies that have a :mailheader:`Content-Transfer-Encoding` of
+ 8bit to instead have a 7bit Content-Transfer-Encoding.
+
+* New function :class:`~email.generator.BytesGenerator` produces bytes
+ as output, preserving any unchanged non-ASCII data that was
+ present in the input used to build the model, including message bodies
+ with a :mailheader:`Content-Transfer-Encoding` of 8bit.
+
+Here are the major differences between :mod:`email` version 5.0 and version 4:
+
+* All operations are on unicode strings. Text inputs must be strings,
+ text outputs are strings. Outputs are limited to the ASCII character
+ set and so can be encoded to ASCII for transmission. Inputs are also
+ limited to ASCII; this is an acknowledged limitation of email 5.0 and
+ means it can only be used to parse email that is 7bit clean.
Here are the major differences between :mod:`email` version 4 and version 3: