Quoted-printable converter

Quoted-printable (QP) is an email transfer encoding defined in RFC 2045. It keeps text that is mostly ASCII readable while safely encoding special characters and long lines for mail servers that only handle 7-bit data. If you have ever viewed an email's source and seen text like caf=C3=A9 or lines ending in =, that is quoted-printable. This converter encodes and decodes it.

How to use it

1. Paste quoted-printable text to decode it, or plain text to encode it.
2. Copy the result.

Rules of the encoding

• Printable ASCII characters stay as they are, except =.
• Any other byte is written as = followed by two uppercase hex digits. = itself becomes =3D.
• Non-ASCII characters are first converted to bytes using the declared charset, usually UTF-8. é is bytes C3 A9, so it becomes =C3=A9.
• Lines are limited to 76 characters. Longer lines are split with a soft line break: a = at the end of the line, which is removed when decoding.
• Spaces and tabs at the end of a line must be encoded.

Example

Prix: 25 € – réduit encodes to Prix: 25 =E2=82=AC =E2=80=93 r=C3=A9duit.

Where you will see it

• Raw email sources (.eml files) with Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable.
• HTML email templates exported from marketing platforms.
• vCard files, which sometimes use QP for names and addresses.

Note that email subject lines use a related but different encoding, the Q encoding inside =?UTF-8?Q?...?= words, where underscores represent spaces.