oracular (3) MIME::QuotedPrint.3perl.gz

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