Using UTF-8 and Unicode data with Perl MIME::Lite

MIME::Lite predates Perl 5.8 which supports Unicode and UTF-8. But it’s easy to get MIME::Lite to work with Unicode bodies and subjects.

To attach a plain text part to a message, with a string which contains unicode characters, use:

$msg->attach(
   Type => 'text/plain; charset=UTF-8',
   Data => encode("utf8", $utf8string),
);

To set the subject of a mail from a string containing unicode characters, use:

use MIME::Base64;
my $msg = MIME::Lite->new(
   ...
   Subject =>   "=?UTF-8?B?" .
      encode_base64(encode("utf8", $subj), "") . "?=",
   ...
);

Note that the above methods also work even if the strings do not contain unicode characters, or do not have the UTF-8 bit set.

It would be better to change MIME::Lite such that subject and data strings are accepted and the above code happens inside MIME::Lite. I’ve filed a bug report. It was rejected.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 9:47 am and is filed under Perl. You can subscribe to Adrian's blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Using UTF-8 and Unicode data with Perl MIME::Lite”

Rob Perelman Says: November 9th, 2008 at 5:34 am
Thanks for the tip! I ended up doing this instead for the second example:

use Encode qw(encode);
my $msg = MIME::Lite->new(
…
Subject => encode(“MIME-B”, $subj),
…
);

Seems a lot simpler.
Steve Says: February 16th, 2011 at 5:18 am
THANK YOU! I have been trying to make my code work for ages ! Really thankful for stopping my white hear growing out :D

Using UTF-8 and Unicode data with Perl MIME::Lite

2 Responses to “Using UTF-8 and Unicode data with Perl MIME::Lite”

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