Quoted-Printable Encode / Decode
Encode or decode Quoted-Printable, the email transfer encoding that escapes non-ASCII as =XX hex sequences.
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About Quoted-Printable Encode / Decode
Quoted-Printable (RFC 2045) is one of two standard 'transfer encodings' for email bodies (the other is Base64). It's optimized for text that's mostly 7-bit ASCII with occasional non-ASCII characters: ASCII bytes pass through unchanged; everything else (and the literal '=' sign) is escaped as =XX with two hex digits.
When to use it
- Decoding an email body to read its raw content
- Inspecting a MIME message header parameter
- Producing Quoted-Printable output for an SMTP test
- Recovering text from a saved email file
How it works
Encoding: each byte that isn't printable ASCII (or that's a literal '=') becomes =XX, with soft line breaks inserted to keep lines under 76 characters. Decoding: =XX sequences are turned back into bytes, =\n soft breaks are removed, and the result is interpreted as UTF-8.
Examples
Decoded: =C3=A9 represents UTF-8 bytes for é
Caf=C3=A9
Café
Frequently asked questions
- How is this different from Base64?
- Base64 expands every 3 bytes to 4 ASCII characters, regardless of content. Quoted-Printable leaves ASCII bytes alone, expanding only non-ASCII. For mostly-ASCII text, QP produces much smaller output.
- What's a 'soft line break'?
- An '=' at the end of a line that's continued on the next line. It exists because email standards limit lines to 76 characters. The decoder removes them transparently.
- What encoding is used for non-ASCII?
- UTF-8. Each byte of the UTF-8 representation becomes one =XX sequence, so non-Latin characters typically expand to 6 or 9 characters.