Encode::MIME::Header(3pm)				 Perl Programmers Reference Guide				 Encode::MIME::Header(3pm)

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 dif-
       ference 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 compli-
       cated.  These days major mail agents all support =?UTF-8? so I think it is just good enough.

SEE ALSO

       Encode

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

perl v5.8.0							    2002-06-01						 Encode::MIME::Header(3pm)