Difference between: <br/> vs. <br/>=20

Question

Can somebody explain the difference between the following html tags?

<br/>

and

<br/>
=20

I found the latter in some .eml but the two seem to do the same when rendered as an .eml message.

Answer 1

=20 isn't part of the tag, it's just text that follows after the <br/> tag.

Was the message encoded as html/quoted-printable? In quoted-printable format, = is used to introduce special sequences. When it's followed up two hexadecimal digits, it's replaced with the character with that code. So =20 represents a space character.

Wikipedia

Answer 2

0x20 is the hexidecimal ascii code for space. I suspect some encoding process replaced 'space' with '=20'. The rendered output will look the same.