How to convert email subject from "? UTF-8? ...? =" To readable string?

Question

Possible duplicate:
encoding / decoding string

Now the object looks like this: =? UTF-8? B 0J / RgNC + 0LLQtdGA0LrQsA ==? =

Answer 1

The part between =?UTF-8?B? and ?= is a base64 encoded string. Extract this part, and then decrypt it.

 import base64 #My buggy SSH account needs this to write unicode output, you hopefully won't import sys import codecs sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter('utf-8')(sys.stdout) encoded = '=?UTF-8?B?0J/RgNC+0LLQtdGA0LrQsA==?=' prefix = '=?UTF-8?B?' suffix = '?=' #extract the data part of the string middle = encoded[len(prefix):len(encoded)-len(suffix)] print "Middle: %s" % middle #decode the bytes decoded = base64.b64decode(middle) #decode the utf-8 decoded = unicode(decoded, 'utf8') print "Decoded: %s" % decoded 

Output:

 Middle: 0J/RgNC+0LLQtdGA0LrQsA== Decoded:  

Answer 2

Perhaps you can use the decode_header function: http://docs.python.org/library/email.header.html#email.header.decode_header