Hatrack River Forum: Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

This is topic Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.

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Posted by Lisa (Member # 8384) on :

I got an e-mail from a cousin, who said he was attaching a document. There's no attachment, but inline, there's this:

code:

--_f6da019b-408a-482c-bb9d-236f91292a8b_
Content-Type: application/pdf
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="2009_10_29_12_08_06.pdf"

JVBERi0xLjMNJeLjz9MNCjEgMCBvYmo8PC9NZXRhZGF0YSAxMSAwIFIvUGFnZXMgMiAwIFIvVHlw
ZS9DYXRhbG9nPj4NZW5kb2JqDTIgMCBvYmo8PC9NZWRpYUJveFswLjAgMC4wIDg0MC4wIDU5Ny4x
Ml0vQ291bnQgMi9UeXBlL1BhZ2VzL0tpZHNbNCAwIFIgOCAwIFJdPj4NZW5kb2JqDTQgMCBvYmo8

And it goes on for a while. It looks like it's UUEncoded, but I tried UUDecoding it, and got nothing but garbage.

He's e-mailing from Hotmail (no, I have no idea why anyone would still be using Hotmail), which might have something to do with it.

Any ideas?

Posted by Lisa (Member # 8384) on :

Oops, never mind:Known bug.

Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :

Somewhere along the line there was an error made in formatting the email correctly (emails are just big blocks of text, with special formatting; attachments are separated out specially at various stages).

The encoding is related to uuencoding, but it isn't quite the same. Use any programming language's base64 decoding library to convert the text back into the PDF document (which will look like gibberish text, but you can paste into a text document, save, and open in a PDF viewer).

Posted by Lisa (Member # 8384) on :

Thanks, fugu. That was a huge help.