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)
- encode_qp( $str, $eol, $binmode )
- This function returns an encoded version of the string
($str) given as argument.
The second argument ($eol) is the line-ending sequence to use. It is
optional and defaults to "\n". Every occurrence of
"\n" is replaced with this string, and it is also used for
additional "soft line breaks" to ensure that no line end up
longer than 76 characters. Pass it as "\015\012" to produce data
suitable for external consumption. The string "\r\n" produces
the same result on many platforms, but not all.
The third argument ($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 character. 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 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 v5.8 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::QuotedPrint qw(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