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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-18T08:34:04+00:00

How does the syntax of the pine/alpine address book work with respect to unicode

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How does the syntax of the pine/alpine address book work with respect to unicode characters? Say that I want to include the entry

Nickname  : søren
Fullname  : sørensen
Fcc       : 
Comment   : 
Addresses : soren@sorensen.something

in my alpine address book. When I open then address book file, this entry coresponds to the line:

=?UTF-8?Q?s=C3=B8ren?=  =?UTF-8?Q?s=C3=B8rensen?=   soren@sorensen.something

I would like to know how this syntax for utf-8 characters work. My motivation for this question is the following: I would like to be able to (by search and replace) to produce a address book file where the real utf-8 characters appaer (since this is more readable), then eddit the file, and then translate back to pine/alpines syntax for utf-8 characters.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I already knew this much about the syntax:

    Local address books (or local cache files for remote address books) are simple text files with lines in the format:

    <nickname>TAB<fullname>TAB<address>TAB<fcc>TAB<comments>

    The last two fields are optional. A “line” may be made up of multiple actual lines in the file by using continuation lines, which are lines beginning with SPACE characters. The line breaks may be after TABs or in between addresses in a distribution list. Each actual line in the file must be less than 1000 characters in length.

    This is directly quoted from the page: Alpine Technical Notes page on the official Alpine messaging sytems homepage. The part I did not know, and now have a pretty god guess at, was the part obout how it treatet utf-8 characters. It seems that for each of field <nickname>, <fullname>, <address>, <fcc>, and <comments>, if the field contains some “certain” character as for example æ, ø, or å, then =?UTF-8?Q? is placed in the beginning of that field and ?= in the end. Now, inbetween these two marks the contents of the field is placed, but with spaces replaced by _ and with “certain” characters replaced by =XX=YY og =YY depending on whether the characters UTF-8 Code is either XX YY or just YY. As an example ø is replaced by =C3=B8, since the UTF-8 Code of ø is C3 B8. Also, å, !, and ; are replaced by =C3=A5, =21, and =3B, respectively, because their UTF-8 Codes are C3 A5, 21, and 3B, respectively.

    NOTE: I am not sure which characters makes Alpine implement the tags =?UTF-8?Q? and ?=, but I know that it is fewer characters than gets translated to their UTF-8 Code. For example, a field containing

    sorensen, soren

    would just be writen af sorensen, soren, but a field containing

    sørensen, søren

    would be converted to

    =?UTF-8?Q?s=C3=B8rensen=2C_s=C3=B8ren?=

    I am not entirely shure whether this is correct, but it seems like a pretty god guess as far as the address books I have looked.

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