OFF: The "=0D" stuff.

[Paul Mather]

On Thu, 22 Apr 1999 DASLUD at AOL.COM wrote:

=>gee guys, what's w/all the "=OD" stuff on that e-mail i forwarded?
=>considering recent discussions, SOMEONE will know...

Larry, this probably won't mean too much, but the "=0D" on the end of
lines (as well as "=20") is a tell-tale sign of a message sent encoded
as "quoted-printable" (as opposed to the "base-64" "gibberish").

"=NN" is a way of quoting non-printing and characters that might
otherwise be stripped from a message (e.g., spaces on the ends of
lines) in transmission.  NN is a hexadecimal number.  OD corresponds
to the ASCII character "CR" or carriage return.  (20H is the ASCII
space character.)  Conventionally, lines of text are terminated using
a "LF" or line feed character.  M$ uses CR+LF to denote breaks between
lines of text.  So, I'm guessing the mail was composed on a M$ system,
and the CRs are being preserved so other M$ systems will get the line
breaks correct.

BTW, quoted-printable is an encoding scheme used in MIME mail
messages.

Aren't you glad you asked? ;-)

Cheers,

Paul.

NP: Gov't Mule, Wetlands, NYC, 12/31/96