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

- NAME
- SYNOPSIS
- ABSTRACT
- DESCRIPTION
- BUGS
- SEE ALSO

# 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

the Encode manpage

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

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