MIME::QuotedPrint

MIME::QuotedPrint(3)   Perl Programmers Reference Guide	 MIME::QuotedPrint(3)



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 (Mul-
       tipurpose Internet Mail Extensions).  The quoted-printable encoding is
       intended to represent data that largely consists of bytes that corre-
       spond 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 hexadeci-
       mal 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



perl v5.8.8			  2001-09-21		 MIME::QuotedPrint(3)