NAME

       MIME::Decoder::NBit - encode/decode a "7bit" or "8bit" stream

SYNOPSIS

       A generic decoder object; see MIME::Decoder for usage.

DESCRIPTION

       This is a MIME::Decoder subclass for the "7bit" and "8bit" content transfer encodings.
       These are not "encodings" per se: rather, they are simply assertions of the content of the
       message.  From RFC-2045 Section 6.2.:

          Three transformations are currently defined: identity, the "quoted-
          printable" encoding, and the "base64" encoding.  The domains are
          "binary", "8bit" and "7bit".

          The Content-Transfer-Encoding values "7bit", "8bit", and "binary" all
          mean that the identity (i.e. NO) encoding transformation has been
          performed.  As such, they serve simply as indicators of the domain of
          the body data, and provide useful information about the sort of
          encoding that might be needed for transmission in a given transport
          system.

       In keeping with this: as of MIME-tools 4.x, this class does no modification of its input
       when encoding; all it does is attempt to detect violations of the 7bit/8bit assertion, and
       issue a warning (one per message) if any are found.

   Legal 7bit data
       RFC-2045 Section 2.7 defines legal "7bit" data:

          "7bit data" refers to data that is all represented as relatively
          short lines with 998 octets or less between CRLF line separation
          sequences [RFC-821].  No octets with decimal values greater than 127
          are allowed and neither are NULs (octets with decimal value 0).  CR
          (decimal value 13) and LF (decimal value 10) octets only occur as
          part of CRLF line separation sequences.

   Legal 8bit data
       RFC-2045 Section 2.8 defines legal "8bit" data:

          "8bit data" refers to data that is all represented as relatively
          short lines with 998 octets or less between CRLF line separation
          sequences [RFC-821]), but octets with decimal values greater than 127
          may be used.  As with "7bit data" CR and LF octets only occur as part
          of CRLF line separation sequences and no NULs are allowed.

   How decoding is done
       The decoder does a line-by-line pass-through from input to output, leaving the data
       unchanged except that an end-of-line sequence of CRLF is converted to a newline "\n".
       Given the line-oriented nature of 7bit and 8bit, this seems relatively sensible.

   How encoding is done
       The encoder does a line-by-line pass-through from input to output, and simply attempts to
       detect violations of the "7bit"/"8bit" domain.  The default action is to warn once per
       encoding if violations are detected; the warnings may be silenced with the QUIET
       configuration of MIME::Tools.

SEE ALSO

       MIME::Decoder

AUTHOR

       Eryq (eryq@zeegee.com), ZeeGee Software Inc (http://www.zeegee.com).

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