MIME::Words(3)

💌 MIME::Words — dealing with RFC 2047 encoded words

okay bestie, buckle up, because this is the module that makes your emails not look like a ransom note made of question marks and equals signs 💖

---

✨ NAME ✨

MIME::Words — deal with RFC 2047 encoded words 🎀

---

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

okay so before you read ANY further, you should go see MIME::Tools to make sure you actually understand where this module fits into the grand scheme of things. fr. go on, do it now. I'll wait. 💅

Ready? Ok...

use MIME::Words qw(:all);

### Decode the string into another string, forgetting the charsets:
$decoded = decode_mimewords(
      'To: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Keld_J=F8rn_Simonsen?= <keld@dkuug.dk>',
      );

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

### Encode a single unsafe word:
$encoded = encode_mimeword("\xABFran\xE7ois\xBB");

### Encode a string, trying to find the unsafe words inside it:
$encoded = encode_mimewords("Me and \xABFran\xE7ois\xBB in town");

---

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

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!?=

and those fields basically decode to (sorry bestie, 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 ENCODED

Function. it goes through the string looking for RFC 2047-style "Q" (quoted-printable, sort of) or "B" (base64) encoding, and decodes them. slay.

In an array context, it 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, it joins the "data" elements of the above list together, and returns that. > Warning: this is information-lossy, and probably not what you want, but if you know that all charsets in the ENCODED string are identical, it might be useful to you. (Before you use this, please see "unmime" in MIME::WordDecoder, which is probably what you want.) 😭

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:

💫 encode_mimeword RAW, [ENCODING], [CHARSET]

Function. Encode a single RAW "word" that has unsafe characters. The "word" will be encoded in its entirety.

### Encode "<<Franc,ois>>":
$encoded = encode_mimeword("\xABFran\xE7ois\xBB");

You may specify the ENCODING ("Q" or "B"), which defaults to "Q". You may specify the CHARSET, which defaults to "iso-8859-1". ✨

💫 encode_mimewords RAW, [OPTS]

Function. Given a RAW string, try to find and encode all "unsafe" sequences of characters:

### Encode a string with some unsafe "words":
$encoded = encode_mimewords("Me and \xABFran\xE7ois\xBB");

Returns the encoded string. Any arguments past the RAW string are taken to define a hash of options:

• Charset — encode all unsafe stuff with this charset. Default is 'ISO-8859-1', a.k.a. "Latin-1".
• Encoding — the encoding to use, "q" or "b". The default is "q".

Warning: this is a quick-and-dirty solution, intended for character sets which overlap ASCII. It does not comply with the RFC 2047 rules regarding the use of encoded words in message headers. You may want to roll your own variant, using encode_mimeword(), for your application. Thanks to Jan Kasprzak for reminding me about this problem. 🙈

---

🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

MIME::Base64, MIME::QuotedPrint, MIME::Tools

For other implementations of this or similar functionality (particularly, ones with proper UTF8 support), see:

Encode::MIME::Header, MIME::EncWords, MIME::AltWords

At some future point, one of these implementations will likely replace MIME::Words and MIME::Words will become deprecated. 💀

---

🎀 NOTES 🎀

It exports its principle functions by default, in keeping with MIME::Base64 and MIME::QuotedPrint. periodt.

---

💜 AUTHOR 💜

Eryq (eryq@zeegee.com), ZeeGee Software Inc (http://www.zeegee.com). Dianne Skoll (dianne@skoll.ca)

All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

Thanks also to...

Kent Boortz        For providing the idea, and the baseline
                   RFC-1522-decoding code!
KJJ at PrimeNet    For requesting that this be split into
                   its own module.
Stephane Barizien  For reporting a nasty bug.

---

and that's the whole vibe, bestie 🫶 this page is from perl v5.42.0, dated 2026-02-11, and it's a MIME::Words(3) situation — User Contributed Perl Documentation, no cap. go forth and decode 💖