(This post is a response to Richard Patchet's request for tips on how to actually use premailer)
First of all, premailer is a Python library that converts a document of HTML and tranforms its <style> tags into inline style attributes on the HTML itself. This comes very handy when you need to take a nicely formatted HTML newletter template and prepare it before sending because when you send HTML emails you can't reference an external .css file.
So, here's how to turn it into a command line script.
First, install, then write the script:
$ pip install premailer
$ touch ~/bin/run-premailer.py
$ chmod +x ~/bin/run-premailer.py
Now, you might want to do this differently but this should get you places:
from premailer import transform
def run(files):
try:
base_url = [x for x in files if x.count('://')][0]
files.remove(base_url)
except IndexError:
base_url = None
for file_ in files:
html = open(file_).read()
print transform(html, base_url=base_url)
if __name__ == '__main__':
import sys
run(sys.argv[1:])
To test it, I've made a sample HTML page that looks like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>Test</title>
<style>
h1, h2 { color:red; }
strong {
text-decoration:none
}
p { font-size:2px }
p.footer { font-size: 1px}
p a:link { color: blue; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Hi!</h1>
<p><strong>Yes!</strong></p>
<p class="footer" style="color:red">Feetnuts</p>
<p><a href="page2/">Go to page 2</a></p>
</body>
</html>
Cool. So let's run it: $ run-premailer.py test.html
<html>
<head>
<title>Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1 style="color:red">Hi!</h1>
<p style="font-size:2px"><strong style="text-decoration:none">Yes!</strong></p>
<p style="{color:red; font-size:1px} :link{color:red}">Feetnuts</p>
<p style="font-size:2px"><a href="page2/" style=":link{color:blue}">Go to page 2</a></p>
</body>
</html>
Note that premailer supports converting relative URLs, so let's actually using that:
$ run-premailer.py test.html https://www.peterbe.com
<html>
<head>
<title>Test</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1 style="color:red">Hi!</h1>
<p style="font-size:2px"><strong style="text-decoration:none">Yes!</strong></p>
<p style="{color:red; font-size:1px} :link{color:red}">Feetnuts</p>
<p style="font-size:2px"><a href="https://www.peterbe.com/page2/"
style=":link{color:blue}">Go to page 2</a></p>
</body>
</html>
I'm sure you can think of many many ways to improve that. Mayhaps use argparse or something fancy to allow for more options. Mayhaps make it so that you can supply named .css files on the command line that get automagically inserted on the fly.
