Re: script to convert those =?? to HTML tags [was Re: LYNX-DEV ftp files]

[David Woolley]

> 
> > Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
> 
> Recently I've been getting a lot of mail with this kind of encoding.  It
> invariably seems to have various "=??" throughout.  I made a script to
> strip of the trailing "="

That's the wrong action; you should concatenate the lines.  Unfortunately
many GUI tools assume that long lines are wrappable paragraphs, when the
are really just very long lines, so treating = newline as a soft return
may well be the more pragmatic strategy.

>                           and "=20", 

This should produce a trailing space, although it is often an artefact of
word wrapping.  It's needed for correct recovery of "-- " signature 
markers.  Space is specifically encoded here to prevent it being lost
in mail transports that strip trailing spaces.

>                                     `and to substitute, e.g., "=A3" to
> "&163;" and "=E9" to "é", but I really hate spending time
> reinventing the wheel.  Is there a script or program out there to
> convert that "=WHATEVER" format to HTML?

metamail and mimeqp should convert these to raw 8 bit data.  If you
want them as HTML, you will have to put them through a logical Unicode
translation and entity encoder, although, if the original was valid ISO
8859/1 you only need to do the normal < > & " encoding.  NB both metamail
and mimeqp will handle trailing = properly, so you will get long lines.