
 The following is an excerpt from RFC 1521 which defines
 Quoted-Printable encoding.

Network Working Group                                      N. Borenstein
Request for Comments: 1521                                      Bellcore
Obsoletes: 1341                                                 N. Freed
Category: Standards Track                                       Innosoft

         MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) Part One:
                Mechanisms for Specifying and Describing
                 the Format of Internet Message Bodies

               Excerpt Defining Quoted-Printable Encoding

5.1.  Quoted-Printable Content-Transfer-Encoding

   The Quoted-Printable encoding is intended to represent data that
   largely consists of octets that correspond to printable characters in
   the ASCII character set.  It encodes the data in such a way that the
   resulting octets are unlikely to be modified by mail transport.  If
   the data being encoded are mostly ASCII text, the encoded form of the
   data remains largely recognizable by humans.  A body which is
   entirely ASCII may also be encoded in Quoted-Printable to ensure the
   integrity of the data should the message pass through a character-
   translating, and/or line-wrapping gateway.

   In this encoding, octets are to be represented as determined by the
   following rules:

      Rule #1: (General 8-bit representation) Any octet, except those
      indicating a line break according to the newline convention of the
      canonical (standard) form of the data being encoded, may be
      represented by an "=" followed by a two digit hexadecimal
      representation of the octet's value.  The digits of the
      hexadecimal alphabet, for this purpose, are "0123456789ABCDEF".
      Uppercase letters must be used when sending hexadecimal data,
      though a robust implementation may choose to recognize lowercase
      letters on receipt.  Thus, for example, the value 12 (ASCII form
      feed) can be represented by "=0C", and the value 61 (ASCII EQUAL
      SIGN) can be represented by "=3D".  Except when the following
      rules allow an alternative encoding, this rule is mandatory.

      Rule #2: (Literal representation) Octets with decimal values of 33
      through 60 inclusive, and 62 through 126, inclusive, MAY be
      represented as the ASCII characters which correspond to those
      octets (EXCLAMATION POINT through LESS THAN, and GREATER THAN
      through TILDE, respectively).

      Rule #3: (White Space): Octets with values of 9 and 32 MAY be
      represented as ASCII TAB (HT) and SPACE characters, respectively,
      but MUST NOT be so represented at the end of an encoded line. Any
      TAB (HT) or SPACE characters on an encoded line MUST thus be
      followed on that line by a printable character.  In particular, an
      "=" at the end of an encoded line, indicating a soft line break
      (see rule #5) may follow one or more TAB (HT) or SPACE characters.
      It follows that an octet with value 9 or 32 appearing at the end
      of an encoded line must be represented according to Rule #1.  This
      rule is necessary because some MTAs (Message Transport Agents,
      programs which transport messages from one user to another, or
      perform a part of such transfers) are known to pad lines of text
      with SPACEs, and others are known to remove "white space"
      characters from the end of a line.  Therefore, when decoding a
      Quoted-Printable body, any trailing white space on a line must be
      deleted, as it will necessarily have been added by intermediate
      transport agents.

      Rule #4 (Line Breaks): A line break in a text body, independent of
      what its representation is following the canonical representation
      of the data being encoded, must be represented by a (RFC 822) line
      break, which is a CRLF sequence, in the Quoted-Printable encoding.
      Since the canonical representation of types other than text do not
      generally include the representation of line breaks, no hard line
      breaks (i.e.  line breaks that are intended to be meaningful and
      to be displayed to the user) should occur in the quoted-printable
      encoding of such types.  Of course, occurrences of "=0D", "=0A",
      "0A=0D" and "=0D=0A" will eventually be encountered.  In general,
      however, base64 is preferred over quoted-printable for binary
      data.

      Note that many implementations may elect to encode the local
      representation of various content types directly, as described in
      Appendix G.  In particular, this may apply to plain text material
      on systems that use newline conventions other than CRLF
      delimiters. Such an implementation is permissible, but the
      generation of line breaks must be generalized to account for the
      case where alternate representations of newline sequences are
      used.

      Rule #5 (Soft Line Breaks): The Quoted-Printable encoding REQUIRES
      that encoded lines be no more than 76 characters long. If longer
      lines are to be encoded with the Quoted-Printable encoding, 'soft'
      line breaks must be used. An equal sign as the last character on a
      encoded line indicates such a non-significant ('soft') line break
      in the encoded text. Thus if the "raw" form of the line is a
      single unencoded line that says:

          Now's the time for all folk to come to the aid of
          their country.

      This can be represented, in the Quoted-Printable encoding, as

          Now's the time =
          for all folk to come=
           to the aid of their country.

      This provides a mechanism with which long lines are encoded in
      such a way as to be restored by the user agent.  The 76 character
      limit does not count the trailing CRLF, but counts all other
      characters, including any equal signs.

   Since the hyphen character ("-") is represented as itself in the
   Quoted-Printable encoding, care must be taken, when encapsulating a
   quoted-printable encoded body in a multipart entity, to ensure that
   the encapsulation boundary does not appear anywhere in the encoded
   body.  (A good strategy is to choose a boundary that includes a
   character sequence such as "=_" which can never appear in a quoted-
   printable body.  See the definition of multipart messages later in
   this document.)

      NOTE: The quoted-printable encoding represents something of a
      compromise between readability and reliability in transport.
      Bodies encoded with the quoted-printable encoding will work
      reliably over most mail gateways, but may not work perfectly over
      a few gateways, notably those involving translation into EBCDIC.
      (In theory, an EBCDIC gateway could decode a quoted-printable body
      and re-encode it using base64, but such gateways do not yet
      exist.)  A higher level of confidence is offered by the base64
      Content-Transfer-Encoding.  A way to get reasonably reliable
      transport through EBCDIC gateways is to also quote the ASCII
      characters

             !"#$@[\]^`{|}~

      according to rule #1.  See Appendix B for more information.

   Because quoted-printable data is generally assumed to be line-
   oriented, it is to be expected that the representation of the breaks
   between the lines of quoted printable data may be altered in
   transport, in the same manner that plain text mail has always been
   altered in Internet mail when passing between systems with differing
   newline conventions.  If such alterations are likely to constitute a
   corruption of the data, it is probably more sensible to use the
   base64 encoding rather than the quoted-printable encoding.

   WARNING TO IMPLEMENTORS: If binary data are encoded in quoted-
   printable, care must be taken to encode CR and LF characters as "=0D"
   and "=0A", respectively.  In particular, a CRLF sequence in binary
   data should be encoded as "=0D=0A".  Otherwise, if CRLF were
   represented as a hard line break, it might be incorrectly decoded on
   platforms with different line break conventions.

   For formalists, the syntax of quoted-printable data is described by
   the following grammar:

   quoted-printable := ([*(ptext / SPACE / TAB) ptext] ["="] CRLF)
        ; Maximum line length of 76 characters excluding CRLF

   ptext := octet /<any ASCII character except "=", SPACE, or TAB>
        ; characters not listed as "mail-safe" in Appendix B
        ; are also not recommended.

   octet := "=" 2(DIGIT / "A" / "B" / "C" / "D" / "E" / "F")
        ; octet must be used for characters > 127, =, SPACE, or TAB,
        ; and is recommended for any characters not listed in
        ; Appendix B as "mail-safe".
