Non-ascii email subject and header encoding

[Ciuin]

Hi all,

I need to mail() emails with user input that does contain non-ascii
(umlauts, accents) and non-latin (cyrillic) characters in the
"Subject:" and "From:" headers. I understand that they are typically
encoded in UTF8 like this:

=?UTF-8?B?w5Z0emkg0J/RgNC40LLQtdGC?=

but I cannot find a PHP function to encode the input string in this
way. utf8_encode gives me garbled char soup, so what do you use?

Thanks.

[Ciuin]

Re: Non-ascii email subject and header encoding

On Mar 27, 11:55 am, "Ciuin" <c...@gmx.dewro te:

Hi all,
>
I need to mail() emails with user input that does contain non-ascii
(umlauts, accents) and non-latin (cyrillic) characters in the
"Subject:" and "From:" headers. I understand that they are typically
encoded in UTF8 like this:
>
=?UTF-8?B?w5Z0emkg0J/RgNC40LLQtdGC?=
>
but I cannot find a PHP function to encode the input string in this
way. utf8_encode gives me garbled char soup, so what do you use?
>
Thanks.

Ah well, bad thinking on my part.

Instead of utf8_encode I need base64_encode, of course (as the "...?
B?..." in the code tells me). So this:

$from = "From: =?UTF-8?B?" . base64_encode($ _POST['name']) . "?= <" . $
$_POST['email'] . ">\n";

produces a correctly encoded header. Same for subject.

Hope it helps someone.

[Erwin Moller]

Re: Non-ascii email subject and header encoding

Ciuin wrote:

On Mar 27, 11:55 am, "Ciuin" <c...@gmx.dewro te:

>Hi all,
>>
>I need to mail() emails with user input that does contain non-ascii
>(umlauts, accents) and non-latin (cyrillic) characters in the
>"Subject:" and "From:" headers. I understand that they are typically
>encoded in UTF8 like this:
>>
>=?UTF-8?B?w5Z0emkg0J/RgNC40LLQtdGC?=
>>
>but I cannot find a PHP function to encode the input string in this
>way. utf8_encode gives me garbled char soup, so what do you use?
>>
>Thanks.

>
Ah well, bad thinking on my part.

Was it?
Not really.

Encoding/charsets/headers/content-type/UTF/unicode/etc ALWAYS gives me a
headache. :-/
Confusing stuff, especially when you have to consider a whole range of
receiving clients (different browsers, emailclients, etc).

Regards,
Erwin Moller

>
Instead of utf8_encode I need base64_encode, of course (as the "...?
B?..." in the code tells me). So this:
>
$from = "From: =?UTF-8?B?" . base64_encode($ _POST['name']) . "?= <" . $
$_POST['email'] . ">\n";
>
produces a correctly encoded header. Same for subject.
>
Hope it helps someone.

[Tim Roberts]

Re: Non-ascii email subject and header encoding

"Ciuin" <ciuin@gmx.dewr ote:

>
>Instead of utf8_encode I need base64_encode, of course (as the "...?
>B?..." in the code tells me). So this:
>
>$from = "From: =?UTF-8?B?" . base64_encode($ _POST['name']) . "?= <" . $
>$_POST['email'] . ">\n";
>
>produces a correctly encoded header. Same for subject.

For completeness, allow me to point out that you can also use
quoted-printable encoding here (you'd use =?utf-8?Q? instead of ...?B?).
Quoted-printable encoding has the "advantage" that ASCII characters survive
unchanged, so if there are ASCII words, they can be read even in their
encoded form.

On the other hand, strings with many non-ASCII characters grow more in
quoted-printable than in base64. Plus, there is no
"quoted_printab le_encode" in the standard library, although sources are
available.
--
Tim Roberts, timr@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.

[Manuel Lemos]

Re: Non-ascii email subject and header encoding

Hello,

on 03/27/2007 06:55 AM Ciuin said the following:

Hi all,
>
I need to mail() emails with user input that does contain non-ascii
(umlauts, accents) and non-latin (cyrillic) characters in the
"Subject:" and "From:" headers. I understand that they are typically
encoded in UTF8 like this:
>
=?UTF-8?B?w5Z0emkg0J/RgNC40LLQtdGC?=
>
but I cannot find a PHP function to encode the input string in this
way. utf8_encode gives me garbled char soup, so what do you use?

That is binary q-encoding. It is not quoted-printable but it is similar
for message headers. There is a whole RFC on that subject.

Yoy may want to try the MIME message that can be used to compose and
send messages and supports headers with non-ASCII characters encoded as
UTF-8 or any other encoding.

Take a look at the test_multibyte_ message.php example script. It
explains how to send messages in Japanese with encoding ISO-2022-JP, but
you can change that for UTF-8 to support characters of all idioms.

http://www.phpclasses.org/mimemessage

--

Regards,
Manuel Lemos

Metastorage - Data object relational mapping layer generator

http://www.metastorage.net/

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