MIME::QuotedPrint

NAME

MIME::QuotedPrint - Encoding and decoding of quoted-printable strings

SYNOPSIS

 use MIME::QuotedPrint;

 $encoded = encode_qp($decoded);
 $decoded = decode_qp($encoded);

DESCRIPTION

This module provides functions to encode and decode strings into and from the quoted-printable encoding specified in RFC 2045 - MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). The quoted-printable encoding is intended to represent data that largely consists of bytes that correspond to printable characters in the ASCII character set. Each non-printable character (as defined by English Americans) is represented by a triplet consisting of the character ``='' followed by two hexadecimal digits.

The following functions are provided:

encode_qp($str)

encode_qp($str, $eol)

This function returns an encoded version of the string given as argument.

The second argument is the line-ending sequence to use. It is optional and defaults to ``\n''. Every occurrence of ``\n'' is replaced with this string, and it is also used for additional ``soft line breaks'' to ensure that no line is longer than 76 characters. You might want to pass it as ``\015\012'' to produce data suitable for external consumption. The string ``\r\n'' produces the same result on many platforms, but not all.

An $eol of "`` (the empty string) is special. In this case, no ''soft line breaks`` are introduced and any literal ''\n" in the original data is encoded as well.

decode_qp($str);

This function returns the plain text version of the string given as argument. The lines of the result are ``\n'' terminated, even if the $str argument contains ``\r\n'' terminated lines.

If you prefer not to import these routines into your namespace, you can call them as:

  use MIME::QuotedPrint ();
  $encoded = MIME::QuotedPrint::encode($decoded);
  $decoded = MIME::QuotedPrint::decode($encoded);

Perl v5.6 and better allow extended Unicode characters in strings. Such strings cannot be encoded directly, as the quoted-printable encoding is only defined for single-byte characters. The solution is to use the Encode module to select the byte encoding you want. For example:

    use MIME::QuotedPrint qw(encode_qp);
    use Encode qw(encode);

    $encoded = encode_qp(encode("UTF-8", "\x{FFFF}\n"));
    print $encoded;

COPYRIGHT

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.