Re: How to convert <binaryGlowMixedWithASCII> to pure ASCII

On Sun, 04 May 2025 18:15:38 +0000, Kenny McCormack wrote:

I am often faced with this problem.
 
I have a string like (this was the "From" address of an email I recently received):
 
    =?utf-8?B?UGhpbGxpcCBHw7xudGVy?= <s69pguen@uni-bonn.de>
 
Note that this may not be the ideal example, but it is the one closest to
hand.  Here's another example:
 
    TF-8?q?They’re_telling_us_something_about_something_ok?
 
when it should have been just:
 
    They're telling us something about something ok?
 
My question is: Is there a (Unix/Linux) tool that will reliably fix this?
I.e. convert the binary glop format into the desired, pure ASCII, format.

What you are looking at is the "punycode"[1] expression of a non-ASCII character
sequence.

AFAIK, there aren't any /standard/ utilities that convert to and from punycode.
However, there are /libraries/ that handle punycode (libidn[2], for one).

Perhaps a web search for IDN tools will come up with a punycode translator
program.

<snip>

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3492.txt
[2] http://www.gnu.org/software/libidn/

--
Lew Pitcher
"In Skills We Trust"