NAME

       Encode::MIME::Header -- MIME 'B' and 'Q' header encoding

SYNOPSIS

           use Encode qw/encode decode/;
           $utf8   = decode('MIME-Header', $header);
           $header = encode('MIME-Header', $utf8);

ABSTRACT

       This module implements RFC 2047 Mime Header Encoding.  There are 3 variant encoding names;
       "MIME-Header", "MIME-B" and "MIME-Q".  The difference is described below

                     decode()          encode()
         ----------------------------------------------
         MIME-Header Both B and Q      =?UTF-8?B?....?=
         MIME-B      B only; Q croaks  =?UTF-8?B?....?=
         MIME-Q      Q only; B croaks  =?UTF-8?Q?....?=

DESCRIPTION

       When you decode(=?encoding?X?ENCODED WORD?=), ENCODED WORD is extracted and decoded for X
       encoding (B for Base64, Q for Quoted-Printable). Then the decoded chunk is fed to
       decode(encoding).  So long as encoding is supported by Encode, any source encoding is
       fine.

       When you encode, it just encodes UTF-8 string with X encoding then quoted with
       =?UTF-8?X?....?= .  The parts that RFC 2047 forbids to encode are left as is and long
       lines are folded within 76 bytes per line.

BUGS

       It would be nice to support encoding to non-UTF8, such as =?ISO-2022-JP?  and
       =?ISO-8859-1?= but that makes the implementation too complicated.  These days major mail
       agents all support =?UTF-8? so I think it is just good enough.

       Due to popular demand, 'MIME-Header-ISO_2022_JP' was introduced by Makamaka.  Thre are
       still too many MUAs especially cellular phone handsets which does not grok UTF-8.

SEE ALSO

       Encode

       RFC 2047, <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2047.html> and many other locations.