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quoted-printable

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Also known as QP

The Quoted-Printable encoding is an escape syntax that uses printable ASCII characters (alphanumeric and the equals sign =) to represent arbitrary binary data to enable transmission of 8-bit data over a 7-bit data path or, generally, over a medium which is not 8-bit clean. Historically, because of the wide range of systems and protocols that could be used to transfer messages, e-mail was often assumed to be non-8-bit-cleanhowever, modern SMTP servers are in most cases 8-bit clean and support the 8BITMIME extension. It can also be used with data that contains non-permitted octets or line length

~5 min read

Encyclopedic overview

7 sections
Contents
  • Introduction
  • Encoding <span class="anchor" id="Quoted-printable encoding"></span>
  • Example
  • See also
  • Notes
  • References
  • External links

The Quoted-Printable encoding is an escape syntax that uses printable ASCII characters (alphanumeric and the equals sign =) to represent arbitrary binary data to enable transmission of 8-bit data over a 7-bit data path or, generally, over a medium which is not 8-bit clean. Historically, because of the wide range of systems and protocols that could be used to transfer messages, e-mail was often assumed to be non-8-bit-cleanhowever, modern SMTP servers are in most cases 8-bit clean and support the 8BITMIME extension. It can also be used with data that contains non-permitted octets or line lengths exceeding SMTP limits. It is defined as a MIME content transfer encoding for use in e-mail.

The Quoted-Printable encoding works by using the equals sign = as an escape character. It also limits line length to 76, as some software has limits on line length.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “quoted-printable” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.