ARCHIVED: In MIME, what is the quoted-printable encoding method?

Quoted-printable is an encoding method defined in the MIME standard. It is used primarily to encode 8-bit text (such as text that includes foreign characters) into 7-bit US ASCII, creating a document that is mostly readable by humans, even in its encoded form. All MIME-compliant applications can decode quoted-printable text, though they may not necessarily be able to properly display the document as it was originally intended.

As quoted-printable encoding is implemented most commonly, printable ASCII characters (values 33 through 126, excluding 61), tabs and spaces that do not appear at the end of lines, and end-of-line characters are not encoded. Other characters are represented by an equal sign ( = ) immediately followed by that character's hexadecimal value. Lines that are longer than 76 characters are shortened by line breaks, with the equal sign marking where the breaks occurred.

For more information about quoted-printable encoding, see RFC 2045, section 6.7, available at:

  http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2045.txt