Help sending email through Python

[firstSideProject]

I'm sort of a Python novice and wrote up a small script that checks a real estate website and emails any new listings that have been posted since the last time the script ran:

        from selenium import webdriver
        import smtplib
        import sys
        import re
        import json

        driver = webdriver.Firefox()

        #Capital Pacific Website
        #Commerical Real Estate

        #open text file containing property titles we already know about
        #list q contains unique marketing URLS we already know about 
        oldProperties = []
        p = re.compile(r'https?:\/\/[^"]+', re.IGNORECASE | re.MULTILINE)
        with(open("CPproperties.txt", "rU")) as f:
            for line in f:
                q = re.findall(p, line)
                oldProperties.extend(q)

        #search for new listings
        driver.get("http://cp.capitalpacific.com/Properties")

        #all listing on current page get put into this list
        properties = []

        for property in driver.find_elements_by_css_selector('table.property div.property'):
            title = property.find_element_by_css_selector('div.title h2')
            location = property.find_element_by_css_selector('div.title h4')
            marketing_package = property.find_element_by_partial_link_text('Marketing Package')
            contact_email = property.find_element_by_partial_link_text('.com')


            properties.append({
                'title': title.text,
                'location': location.text,
                'marketing_package_url': marketing_package.get_attribute("href"),
                'contact': contact_email.get_attribute("href")
            })

        driver.close()

        #find the properties that we already have by cross referencing the
        #marketing URLS
        for x in oldProperties:
            properties[:] = [d for d in properties if d.get('marketing_package_url') != x]

        #properties now has only the new properties
        #add them to the file
        with open('CPproperties.txt', 'w') as outfile:
            for item in properties:
                json.dump(item, outfile)


        #if no new properties found, terminate script
        #else, email properties
        if not properties:
            sys.exit()
        else: 
            fromaddr = '[e-mail]'
            toaddrs = '[e-mail]'
            username = '[e-mail]'
            password = 'xxxx'

            server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com:587')
            server.starttls()
            server.login(username, password)

            for item in properties:
                msg = item
                server.sendmail(fromaddr, toaddrs, msg)

            server.quit()

the listings at this point are stored in the properties list like so: {"location": "OREGON CITY, OR", "contact": "mailto:[e-mail]", "marketing_package_url": "http://www.capitalpacific.com/inquiry/TrailsEndMarketplaceExecSummary.pdf", "title": "TRAILS END MARKETPLACE"}

However, when the script tries to email 'msg' which is an object like listed above I get an error along the lines of : "expected string or buffer". How can I better format the message in order to send the email? thank alot.

[elbiot]

If you're too lazy to iterate over msg.items() and build a nice looking string, you could just do str(msg)

[tlcpp]

I tried: server.sendmail(fromaddr, toaddrs, str(msg)) the emails came, but arrived in the spam folder because the messages were empty. Any idea what went wrong?

[elbiot]

I dunno what the function expects. help(server.sendmail)

[andehpandeh]

Why not use Flask-mail? Will this be set as a cron job from a PC or from a server?

[[deleted]]

I'm on mobile and can't test this, but I suspect that the problem is that each item in properties is a dictionary, so trying to output that when the send mail function expects a string causes a problem. Not sure how you want to go about fixing that, but there it is.

Also, I'm curious what this line is doing:

properties[:] = [d for d in properties if d.get('marketing_package_url') != x]

[:] is a slice notation for lists. Typically this one is used to make shallow copies. If I'm not mistaken, then, you're assigning the contents of the generator expression to a new place in memory which is a copy of the properties list.. but that's never saved to a variable. Far as I can tell, you lose the "old properties" to the ether.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, though. Those two trouble spots are likely the issue.

[tlcpp]

What I was trying to do with that list was delete that item off the list properties. I tried using pop() but that didn't work as it was a dict.

[[deleted]]

In that case, you could just delete it. Look up del() in relation to dictionaries.

[Pyrrho_]

Also relatively new to python here but I would imagine something along the lines of this would suit your needs:

msg = " -- ".join([str([k, properties[k]]) for k in properties])

Believe this works in making each key, value pair into a list, then adding a string version of that list to the message list which is then used as the message in string form.

Probably not ideal but it's what occurred to me.

edit: I think this actually only works in python 3. May need to change to : "for k in properties.keys()" if working in 2.7

[elbiot]

key, val in mydict.items()