MIME::...edPrint(3perl) Perl Programmers Reference GuideMIME::...edPrint(3perl)
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
perl v5.40.1 2026-08-30 MIME::...edPrint(3perl)
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