converters/p5-MIME-Base64 3.16 MidnightBSD

This package contains a base64 encoder/decoder and a quoted-printable encoder/decoder. These encoding methods are specified in RFC 2045 - MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions).

The base64 encoding is designed to represent arbitrary sequences of octets in a form that need not be humanly readable. A 65-character subset ([A-Za-z0-9+/=]) of US-ASCII is used, enabling 6 bits to be represented per printable character.

The quoted-printable encoding is intended to represent data that largely consists of bytes that correspond to printable characters in the ASCII character set. Non-printable characters are represented by a triplet consisting of the character "=" followed by two hexadecimal digits.

The MIME::Base64 and MIME::QuotedPrint modules used to be part of libwww-perl package. They are now distributed separately (this package). The main improvement is that the base64 encoder/decoder is implemented by XS functions. This makes it about 20 times faster than the old implementation in perl.