Softonic

Quoted-Printable Encoder

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Quoted-printable is the encoding that lets 8-bit text survive a 7-bit mail transfer. This encoder converts each byte above 126 (and a few special ones like =) into =XX hex escapes, soft-wraps lines at 76 characters and gives you a string you can drop into a MIME Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable body.

How to encode to quoted-printable

  1. 1

    Paste your text

    The input is treated as UTF-8 by default. Accented letters and emoji become multi-byte sequences.

  2. 2

    Click encode

    Bytes outside the printable ASCII range, plus the literal = sign, become =HH escapes in uppercase hex.

  3. 3

    Use the soft line breaks

    Lines longer than 76 characters are broken with a trailing = and a CRLF. Your MTA will reassemble them.

The rules, short version

RFC 2045 defines quoted-printable. The important bits:

Byte range Handling
33 to 126 except = (61) Printed as-is
9 (tab), 32 (space) As-is unless at end of line
= (61) Always escaped as =3D
Everything else Escaped as =HH
Line length > 76 Soft-wrap with = + CRLF

Why this exists

SMTP historically guaranteed 7-bit clean delivery. Anything outside that range could be stripped, flipped or split. Quoted-printable keeps the body legible when opened in a debugger (unlike base64, which is opaque) while still being safe for transport.

Common gotchas

  • Trailing spaces. A space at the end of a line must be encoded as =20, otherwise mail relays will strip it.
  • Line endings. Use CRLF, not LF. RFC 5322 headers insist on it.
  • UTF-8 first. Encode your text to UTF-8 bytes, then quoted-printable. Doing it in the wrong order mangles accented characters.

Frequently Asked Questions

Quoted-printable if the text is mostly ASCII with occasional non-ASCII bytes (typical European email). Base64 if the content is binary or heavily non-Latin: it packs more efficiently.

That is a typographic right-single-quote (U+2019) encoded as its UTF-8 bytes. A client that does not understand quoted-printable is showing the raw escapes.

RFC 2045 sets 76 as the hard maximum for a quoted-printable line. Most encoders wrap at 75 to leave room for the trailing = soft-break. Exceeding 76 risks being rejected by strict MTAs.

Yes. This tool submits the text to the site for encoding or decoding. Do not paste passwords, private keys or confidential message content.

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