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 (as 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 as pure Perl.

In order to install and use this package you will need Perl version
5.002 or better.  Installation as usual:

   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make test
   make install

The library can also be installed without XS support (for instance because
you don't have a working C compiler installed).  Simply remove the Base64.xs
file before running 'perl Makefile.PL' and everything should work the same,
although encoding and decoding will be much slower.

Copyright 1995-1999 Gisle Aas <gisle@aas.no>

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
