This package contains a base64 encoder/decoder and a quoted-printable
encoder/decoder.  These encoding methods are specified in RFC 2045 -
MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions).

The base64 encoding is designed to represent arbitrary sequences of
octets in a form that need not be humanly readable. A 65-character
subset ([A-Za-z0-9+/=]) of US-ASCII is used, enabling 6 bits to be
represented per printable character.

The quoted-printable encoding is intended to represent data that
largely consists of bytes that correspond to printable characters in
the ASCII character set.  Non-printable characters are represented by
a triplet consisting of the character "=" followed by two hexadecimal
digits.

The MIME::Base64 and MIME::QuotedPrint modules used to be part of
libwww-perl package.  They are now distributed separately (this
package).  The main improvement is that the base64 encoder/decoder is
implemented by XS functions.  This makes it about 20 times faster than
the old implementation in perl.

WWW: http://search.cpan.org/dist/MIME-Base64/