Adding a newline to e-mail body

[Mirador]

Can anyone tell me how to add newlines to an email message body when using eMessage.Body ?

I am running LO 5.1.6.2 on Linux MINT 18.2.

For example:

eMsg = "Dear sir,\n\n"
eMsg = "This is a polite reminder of your next appointment.\n\n"
eMsg = "Appointment date: " & aDate & "\n"
eMsg = "Appoitment time: " & aTime & "\n"
eMsg = ... etc, etc, etc
eMailer = createUnoService("com.sun.star.system.SimpleCommandMail")
eMessage = eMailer.createSimpleMailMessage()
eMessage.Recipient = eMailAddr
eMessage.Subject = "Your next appointment " + dTdate
eMessage.Body = eMsg
eMailer.sendSimpleMailMessage (eMessage, com.sun.star.system.SimpleMailClientFlags.NO_USER_INTERFACE)

When the message is opens in Thunderbird, all of the text is on one continuous line. I have also tried & chr(10) & chr(13) as well as %0A %0D without any success

I have also used:

eMessage.Body = "Dear sir,\n\n"
eMessage.Body  = eMessage.Body + "This is a polite reminder of your next appointment..."
etc

It makes no difference. I need to compose a message body that consists of several lines of text. Surely this must be possible? I have done it before in Python, Perl etc, but it seems not to work in LO?

UPDATE: I hit upon the idea of displaying the body of the message (either eMsg or eMessage.Body) using MsgBox. I then found that Chr(10) or Chr(13) with upper case ‘C’ does indeed insert line breaks. I have therefore revised the above to:

eMsg = "Dear sir," + Chr(13) + Chr(13)
eMsg = eMsg + "This is a polite reminder of your next appointment."  + Chr(13) + Chr(13)
eMsg = eMsg + "Appointment date: " + aDate + Chr(13)
eMsg = eMsg + "Appoitment time: " + aTime + Chr(13)
eMsg = eMsg + "... etc, etc, etc"
eMailer = createUnoService("com.sun.star.system.SimpleCommandMail")
eMessage = eMailer.createSimpleMailMessage()
eMessage.Recipient = eMailAddr
eMessage.Subject = "Your next appointment " + dTdate
eMessage.Body = eMsg
eMailer.sendSimpleMailMessage (eMessage, com.sun.star.system.SimpleMailClientFlags.NO_USER_INTERFACE)

Unfortunately, Thunderbird still produces just one long line of text in the body of the message.

[Ratslinger]

Hello,

Replace Chr(13) with "<br />".

HTML carriage return.

Also had a problem with your eMsg lines overwriting each other. Changed mine to (for test hard coded date & time):

eMsg = "Dear Sir:" + "<br />" + "<br />"
eMsg1 = "This is a polite reminder of your next appointment." + "<br />" + "<br />"
eMsg2 = "Appointment date: " + "05/16/2018" + "<br />"
eMsg3 = "Appointment time: " + "8 a.m." + "<br />"
objMessage.Body = eMsg + eMsg1 + eMsg2 + eMsg3

Note also that , after Sir was replaced with colon because nothing sent after comma. Not into HTML so can’t say why this was. Result:

If this answers your question please tick the (upper left area of answer). It helps others to know there was an accepted answer.

[Mirador]

Thank you very much for your efforts. I made a mistake when I copied the eMsg lines into the post. My actual code reads:

eMsg = eMsg + “line of text”

eMsg1, eMsg2 etc works just as well though. I have edited the third snippet to reflect this.

I tried using <br /> as you suggested (with and without the space) but all I get is
instances of <br /> in the body of the message. Curious that it worked for you, as is the issue with the comma you mention. Are you running this on Windows or Linux?

[Mirador]

Could it be down to adding something like ‘Content-Type: text/plain; charset=“UTF-8”’ or ‘Content-Type: text/HTML; charset=“UTF-8”’? I added this as the first line of the body, but it just displays the line instead of interpreting it as a container. Is there a way of setting this in the eMessage object?

[Ratslinger]

My system is Linux Mint 18. Did find setting in Thunderbird where chr(13) worked. It is a matter of composing in text or HTML. See this post for more info → How to select composing mode. There are possibly other items you may have set which could be causing some of the problem.

BTW - using LO 6.0.4

Yours seems to be somewhat older. May consider upgrading.

[Mirador]

Just a further update. I tried running this with a different e-mail software package called Geary, which is another GUI client. This appeared as an option in system preferences and I selected it to be the default e-mail client and tried the script again. This time it opened in Geary as expected and the formatting was just fine. I go back to Thunderbird and test the composing mode suggestion. Will also see whether I can upgrade LO. Just running the version from the MINT/Ubuntu repository.

[Mirador]

Ha! The changing the composing mode worked! Thanks. I did look for such a setting but couldn’t find it because I was looking in Preferences, so thanks for posting that link. I didn’t think to look under the account specific settings.

Thanks for helping me to sort that out. I would actually like it to work in both Plain Text and HTML so I will now experiment a bit more with the HTML tags a bit further.

[Mirador]

BTW, ThunderBird has a command line flag to set text mode. Is there a way in LO of adding command line parameters to whatever command is used to call the e-mail client?

[Ratslinger]

Not aware of a method to do so. If I discover one will post it here.