email parsing problem?

[Octavian]

Ok, I have what I thought would be a simple concept turning into a real pain. Basically, the thought is this: A user from wherever sends an email to our HPUX machine (using perl 5.6.1) with a file attached to the email. The HPUX machine has an alias that calls a perl script. This perl script simply throws STDIN into an array, and prints out the contents to a file. such as:

@stuffin = <STDIN>;
open(tofile,">/tmp/filename");
foreach $line(@stuffin)
{
    print tofile "$line";
}
close tofile;

now, for normal text files, works like a charm....but we now have people that are trying to send us xml stuff (of which I dont know hardly anything about), and for some reason, several characters are being replaced with other chars, causing it to not work correctly...an example is:
xmlns="http://www.com" xmlns:xsi="http://www.foo.com"
becomes
xmlns3D"http://www.com" =xmlns:xsi3D"http://www.foo.com"
any ideas why stuff like 3D gets put in there, and how to I get rid of that stuff?

[hanenkamp]

This is happening because the emails are in Quoted-Printable format. You may want to look into filtering via MIME::QuotedPrint.

[Octavian]

well, I added the :

use MIME::QuotedPrint;

line, and changed:

print tomail "$line\n";

to use:

$decoded = MIME::QuotedPrint::decode($line);
print tomail "$decoded";

and still no joy...I have a feeling this is the way to go, but I am not grasping the concept or something...

[holo]

You are parsing data incorrectly (try long lines or lines starting with "--" to get a bunch of email-control characters.

Use Mail::Message to get attachments out of the email and manipulate mime types better.

use Mail::Message;
my $fromline = <STDIN>;
my $msg = Mail::Message->read(\*STDIN);

if($msg->isMultipart) {
  for($msg->body->parts) {
    open(my $tofile,">/tmp/filename")
      or die "Error opening tmpfile: $!";

    $_->print($tofile);

    close $tofile;

    # print
  }
}

As you might guess, multiple attachments are also handled correctly.

[Octavian]

That looks like a pretty good idea, we dont have Mail::Message installed though...so its not gonna help..I will see about getting that module, but making a change to our version of perl takes forever (yes, I work for the government)
the only related modules we do have are (I searched for MIME and Mail):

MIME::Base64
MIME::QuotedPrint
Mail::Sender

[shockme]

*sigh* I work for an extension of a State government. I feel your pain.

At times like this, the adage "it's easier to apologize than get permission" might serve you well. YMMV.