Re: questions on QP, non-text attachments and munpack

Jamie Zawinski <jwz@netscape.com> Fri, 09 February 1996 03:44 UTC

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From: Jamie Zawinski <jwz@netscape.com>
To: hansen@pegasus.att.com
Cc: ietf-822@list.cren.net
Subject: Re: questions on QP, non-text attachments and munpack
References: <9602081358.AA07818@ig4.att.att.com>
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hansen@pegasus.att.com wrote:
> 
>     o   Is my mailer correct in believing that it should be able to use QP
>         for non-text attachments? After all, QP IS supposed to just be an
>         encoding.
> 
>     o   Is munpack wrong in stripping CR's when dealing with non-text
>         attachments?

I believe the answers are "no" and "yes".  It's true that QP is "just"
an encoding, but it's an encoding for line-based data, which implies
that the data should be CRLF while on the wire, but may be converted to
the local newline convention when decoded.  Base64 doesn't include this
implication.  So for non-line-baseddata, you need to use Base64.

-- 
Jamie Zawinski    jwz@netscape.com   http://www.netscape.com/people/jwz/
``A signature isn't a return address, it is the ASCII equivalent of a
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