Decoding UTF-8 Encoded Header

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17184199

  •  01-06-2022
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Question

I'm using PHP imap to read emails out of an inbox. It extracts some information from headers. One of the headers looks like this:

X-My-Custom-Header: =?UTF-8?B?RXVnZW4gQmFiacSH?=

The original value of that encoded string is Eugen Babić.

When I try to decode that string using PHP, I can't get it quite right, the ć always comes back messed up.

I've tried imap_utf8, imap_mime_header_decode and a bunch of others I can't quite recall. They either don't return anything at all, or they mess up the ć as I mentioned before.

What is the correct way to decode this?

Was it helpful?

Solution 2

Here's what you're doing wrong: You're HTML (as generated by the PHP) is not UTF-8 encoded. So even though it's returning the accented c, the page isn't displaying it correctly.

To fix it, add this in your <head> tag:

<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=utf-8'>

OTHER TIPS

imap_utf8 and imap_mime_header_decode work just fine; there's also iconv_mime_decode:

php > echo imap_utf8('X-My-Custom-Header: =?UTF-8?B?RXVnZW4gQmFiacSH?='), "\n";
X-My-Custom-Header: Eugen Babić

php > list($k,$v) = imap_mime_header_decode('X-My-Custom-Header: =?UTF-8?B?RXVnZW4gQmFiacSH?=');
php > echo $v->text, "\n";
Eugen Babić

php > echo iconv_mime_decode('X-My-Custom-Header: =?UTF-8?B?RXVnZW4gQmFiacSH?=', 0, "utf8"), "\n";
X-My-Custom-Header: Eugen Babić

It seems that imap_utf8 returns its output in NFD, so that the accent over the c may appear out of place in some settings.

The function mb_decode_mimeheader() solved the problem

            "fromName" => (isset($fromInfo->personal))
                ? mb_decode_mimeheader( $fromInfo->personal) : "",
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