Question

I need to process some emails and these contain character phrases such as:

=E2=82=AC

which apparently are the bytes for a euro sign.

I also get things such as:

VALIGN=3D"top"

which I’m not sure what that means (the 3D part).

And other such as :

FirstName=C2=A0LastName

Does anyone know how to convert this to the proper character via PHP?

Thanks.

Answer 1

As Gumbo pointed out, the characters are encoded as a quoted-printable string. To decode, use this aptly named function:

$string = '=E2=82=AC';
echo quoted_printable_decode($string);
// echoes out €

But as MarkReed has pointed out, this isn’t really a solution if your mail logic is flawed. Look into a robust e-mail framework or library if this functionality forms a large part of your app.