Quoted-Printable

How it works

Quoted-Printable is an encoding, defined in the MIME standard, that lets mostly-text data with a few special or non-ASCII characters travel safely through systems that only handle 7-bit text — chiefly email. Readable characters stay as they are, while bytes outside the safe range are written as = followed by two hexadecimal digits (so é becomes =C3=A9 in UTF-8). This tool encodes your text to Quoted-Printable or decodes it back, entirely in your browser, and it is UTF-8 safe so accents and emoji round-trip correctly.

Encoding and decoding

Type or paste your text and press Encode to get the Quoted-Printable form, complete with soft line breaks (= at the end of a wrapped line) so no line exceeds the recommended length. Paste a Quoted-Printable string and press Decode to recover the original text; soft breaks are removed and every =XX sequence is turned back into its byte. The result appears below, ready to copy.

A concrete example

Imagine an email body that needs to say Naïve café — €5 but the servers in between only accept clean ASCII. Encoded to Quoted-Printable, the readable letters Na and ve stay untouched, while the multi-byte ï, é and the euro sign are written out as their UTF-8 byte pairs, and the em dash becomes its two bytes too. What you actually get is a compact string of plain ASCII ending with =20 for the trailing space, which any legacy mail system carries without corruption. Pasting that string back in and pressing Decode restores the exact original sentence.

What to expect

The tool works on one side at a time: encode turns plain text into Quoted-Printable, decode turns Quoted-Printable back into text, and the Copy button puts the current result on your clipboard. On encode, bytes that are printable ASCII apart from =, plus the space and tab, pass through untouched; everything else — accents, emoji, symbols — becomes =XX, and lines are soft-wrapped at 75 characters so they stay within the MIME recommendation. On decode, soft line breaks are stripped and every =XX pair is converted back to its byte, with anything unrecognized carried over as-is so partial or hand-edited input still decodes gracefully.

Common problems and fixes

My decoded text shows odd characters. This usually means the source string was decoded with a different byte length in mind — Quoted-Printable is defined over bytes, so data that was originally in Latin-1 instead of UTF-8 will decode to slightly different text; re-encode it from the known encoding if possible.

The encoded output still looks like it contains =XX everywhere. That is not an error: any byte outside the printable ASCII range is supposed to be written that way, and the equals sign itself is escaped as =3D so it can never be confused with an encoded byte.

My lines come out longer than expected. This tool wraps lines at 75 characters as recommended by MIME, but if you paste output elsewhere it may already be re-wrapped; the decoder removes soft breaks regardless of where they fall.

I pasted a string but Decode does nothing visible. Check that the input really contains =XX or = soft breaks — a string with no equals signs is regular text and decodes back to nearly the same thing, which can make the button seem ineffective.

Frequently asked questions