About the Quoted-Printable Decode
Email bodies and headers saved or copied in quoted-printable are littered with =C3=A9 style escapes and = soft line breaks. This tool reverses the encoding: it removes soft breaks, converts each =XX back to its byte, and decodes the resulting bytes as UTF-8, so an accented message reads correctly again.
Two roles of the = sign have to be told apart, and position alone decides which is which. Followed by two hex digits it introduces an escaped byte; sitting at the very end of a line it is a soft break, and the newline after it vanishes completely. Getting that backwards is why hand-editing quoted-printable so often leaves line breaks stranded in the middle of words. A lone = followed by anything else is passed through as it stands rather than rejected, matching what tolerant mail clients do.
It is the counterpart to Quoted-Printable Encode and a quick way to read a raw email source or a saved MIME part. Encoded-word subject lines of the form =?utf-8?Q?...?= use the same escaping but with underscores standing in for spaces, so strip that wrapper before pasting a header here. For the other common email encoding, use Base64 Decode, and Quoted-Printable Encode goes the other way.
How to use
- Paste the quoted-printable text.
- Read the decoded message.
- Soft breaks and =XX escapes are handled automatically.
Common questions
- What are the =XX codes?
- Each is one byte written in hexadecimal, escaped because it was not a safe printable ASCII character.
- Why did the line breaks change?
- Lines ending in = are soft breaks used for wrapping; the decoder joins them back into continuous text.
- It still looks garbled. Why?
- The bytes may have been encoded in a non-UTF-8 charset. Quoted-printable stores bytes; this tool assumes UTF-8.