Manual of Lua-DataFilter: qp

qp_encode and qp_decode - DataFilter algorithms for quoted-printable encoding and decoding

Overview

These two algorithms are part of the Lua-DataFilter package. See the overview documentation in lua-datafilter(3) for information about how to use them.

Warning: these implementations of quoted printable encoding are not safe to use for binary encoding. Currently they will normalize line ending characters in a way which could corrupt binary data, although they should be perfectly suitable for processing text. This is likely to get fixed in the future, but at that point the default treatment of line endings may change.

Default behaviour of qp_encode

qp_encode will escape certain characters using = characters. It will also break the output into lines of no more than 76 characters in length, using soft line breaks (= at the end of a line) to avoid introducing new hard line breaks (so when you decode the encoded text you won't get extra line breaks in it).

Line breaks, both real ones and soft ones, will be output as a carriage return followed by a line feed (US-ASCII characters 13 and 10).

Options for qp_encode

The line_ending option, if provided, should be a string. It will be used as the line ending, both for hard and soft line breaks, instead of the default carriage return linefeed sequence. An empty string value will prevent anything being produced at the ends of lines.

Default behaviour of qp_decode

This will reverse the encoding of characters performed by qp_encode, and remove soft line breaks. The real line endings in the input will be normalized to linefeed characters.

qp_decode currently doesn't accept any options.