Mail gem - how to clean up the body string

Question

I'm trying to read an email using ruby mail gem. But mail.body.decoded returns me not just the body message. How can I clean up this body message and remove unwanted text like:

-20cf30433c9a437cc304939017ef\nContent-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1\nContent-

message = $stdin.read
mail = Mail.read_from_string(message)
puts mail.body.decoded

--20cf30433c9a437cc304939017ef\nContent-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1\nContent-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable\n\n REAL BODY TEXT \\n\n--20cf30433c9a437cc304939017ef\nContent-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1\nContent-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable\n\n<br clear=3D\"all\">--20cf30433c9a437cc304939017ef--

How can I clean up this email body mail message extracting only the REAL BODY TEXT , without ANY header ?

I'm creating a simple Ticket System based in Ruby on Rails, and a ticket is created when an email is received by [email protected]. But when the message is in HTML format the BODY TEXT is surrounded by HEADERs text.

Answer 1

If you have a properly formatted email, you can use Mail helper methods:

mail = Mail.new(email_string)
mail.text_part # finds the first text/plain part
mail.html_part # finds the first text/html part

This doesn't always work if you have e.g. single part messages (text only) or receive email from the internet at large since you can't rely on formatting from every client out there. Believe me, I've learned the hard way.

Answer 2

Add the mail gem and just use email body format with mail.parts[1].body.decoded.

Answer 3

With the mail gem, you can do:

text = mail.multipart? ? mail.text_part.decoded : mail.body.decoded`

Answer 4

looks like you've got a multipart email, so you can use mail.parts[0].body.decoded These will probably come in handy too: mail.multipart?
mail.parts.length

The gem documentation at github is pretty decent