NAME

SYNOPSIS

If you want to encode or decode MIME words (such as "=?ISO-8859-2?Q?_=E1ll_e=E1r?=") found in e-mail message headers (mostly Subject, From and To), the recommended Perl module to use is MIME::AltWords. Please don't use MIME::AltWords0 (which is useless by itself anyway) or MIME::Words (version 5.420 has several serious bugs both with encoding and decoding).

Most users shouldn't read on, but they should read MIME::AltWords instead.

DESCRIPTION

    use MIME::AltWords0 qw(:all);   
     
    ### Split string into array of decoded [DATA,CHARSET] pairs:
    @decoded = decode_mimewords_wantarray(
          'To: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Keld_J=F8rn_Simonsen?= <keld@dkuug.dk>',
          );

Fellow Americans, you probably won't know what the hell this module is for. Europeans, Russians, et al, you probably do. ":-)".

For example, here's a valid MIME header you might get:

      From: =?US-ASCII?Q?Keith_Moore?= <moore@cs.utk.edu>
      To: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Keld_J=F8rn_Simonsen?= <keld@dkuug.dk>
      CC: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Andr=E9_?= Pirard <PIRARD@vm1.ulg.ac.be>
      Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?B?SWYgeW91IGNhbiByZWFkIHRoaXMgeW8=?=
       =?ISO-8859-2?B?dSB1bmRlcnN0YW5kIHRoZSBleGFtcGxlLg==?=
       =?US-ASCII?Q?.._cool!?=

The fields basically decode to (sorry, I can only approximate the Latin characters with 7 bit sequences /o and 'e):

      From: Keith Moore <moore@cs.utk.edu>
      To: Keld J/orn Simonsen <keld@dkuug.dk>
      CC: Andr'e  Pirard <PIRARD@vm1.ulg.ac.be>
      Subject: If you can read this you understand the example... cool!

PUBLIC INTERFACE

decode_mimewords_wantarray ENCODED, [OPTS...]

Function. Go through the string looking for RFC-1522-style "Q" (quoted-printable, sort of) or "B" (base64) encoding, and decode them.

In an array context, splits the ENCODED string into a list of decoded "[DATA, CHARSET]" pairs, and returns that list. Unencoded data are returned in a 1-element array "[DATA]", giving an effective CHARSET of "undef".

    $enc = '=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Keld_J=F8rn_Simonsen?= <keld@dkuug.dk>';
    foreach (decode_mimewords($enc)) {
        print "", ($_[1] || 'US-ASCII'), ": ", $_[0], "\n";
    }
    

In a scalar context, the result is undocumented, please see "decode_mimewords" in MIME::AltWords instead.

In the event of a syntax error, $@ will be set to a description of the error, but parsing will continue as best as possible (so as to get something back when decoding headers). $@ will be false if no error was detected.

Any arguments past the ENCODED string are taken to define a hash of options:

POD ERRORS

Around line 60:

=over without closing =back

Around line 353:

Non-ASCII character seen before =encoding in 'Péter'. Assuming UTF-8