ext::MIME::Base64PerloProgrammeext::MIME::Base64::QuotedPrint(3p)NAMEMIME::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 char-
acters in the ASCII character set. Each non-printable char-
acter (as defined by English Americans) is represented by a
triplet consisting of the character "=" followed by two hex-
adecimal digits.
The following functions are provided:
encode_qp($str)
encode_qp($str, $eol)
encode_qp($str, $eol, $binmode)
This function returns an encoded version of the string
($str) given as argument.
The second argument ($eol) is the line-ending sequence
to use. It is optional and defaults to "\n". Every
occurrence of "\n" is replaced with this string, and it
is also used for additional "soft line breaks" to ensure
that no line end up longer than 76 characters. Pass it
as "\015\012" to produce data suitable for external con-
sumption. The string "\r\n" produces the same result on
many platforms, but not all.
The third argument ($binmode) will select binary mode if
passed as a TRUE value. In binary mode "\n" will be
encoded in the same way as any other non-printable char-
acter. This ensures that a decoder will end up with
exactly the same string whatever line ending sequence it
uses. In general it is preferable to use the base64
encoding for binary data; see MIME::Base64.
An $eol of "" (the empty string) is special. In this
case, no "soft line breaks" are introduced and binary
mode is effectively enabled so that any "\n" in the ori-
ginal data is encoded as well.
decode_qp($str);
perl v5.8.8 2005-02-05 1
ext::MIME::Base64PerloProgrammeext::MIME::Base64::QuotedPrint(3p)
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 v5.8 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::QuotedPrintqw(encode_qp);
use Encode qw(encode);
$encoded = encode_qp(encode("UTF-8", "\x{FFFF}\n"));
print $encoded;
COPYRIGHT
Copyright 1995-1997,2002-2004 Gisle Aas.
This library is free software; you can redistribute it
and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
SEE ALSO
MIME::Base64
perl v5.8.8 2005-02-05 2
