Python-powered chat apps with Twilio and SendGrid Transcripts
Chapter: Beautiful confirmation emails
Lecture: What about plaintext?
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I'm delighted with how our HTML message came out.
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But remember, if your client you said I want to receive text only plain text
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only well, you're going to get a much less impressive response.
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Your receipt. Thanks for ordering a small cake that's not convincing.
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That's not fun. So there's two things we could do.
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We could actually put like some kind of markdown plain text template here and use jinja
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to render it. That's one option.
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But then, of course, you still have to keep them in sync.
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That's tricky. What if we could just have a friendly version of text here,
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like even maybe a markdown version?
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That would be cool. Can we do that?
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Yes, yes, we can, watch this.
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We go over here, you Pypi.
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There's a cool library called html2text,
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and what does it do is a script that converts HTML and that clean and easy
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to read text. Better yet,
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that also happens to be marked down,
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for example. So if you've got like a bulleted list,
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it'll put Star Item 1 star,
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Item 2 and so on, so that would make it a little bit easier to
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read. How hard is this to use?
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Well, Not hard at all.
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It's over here. We want to use
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html2text install that and then we go to our HTML.
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We say html to text. We import this and then on there we can say
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html the text. And what does it take?
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It requires that we give it html, like so, that's it.
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Now we've converted over to HTML.
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Let's print the text and then return real quick.
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We're not going to see this in my Gmail account so,
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That's not gonna help. Let's send it again.
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Look at this. We've got our image and I guess we could exclude the image
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Exclude the links if we want,
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But your cake is being processed.
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How fantastic is that? Hey,
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Mike Kennedy, Thank you for ordering our award winning cake.
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This is your confirmation order and we've got a little emphasis in our text.
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And then here's a table looking thing that we might have, so size is small, flavors
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such and such and so on.
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Really, really nice. I think this is pretty decent.
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It's not perfect, but as a way of saying here's a pretty good guess at
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what the text should look like. I think that's pretty neat.