🚀 go-pugleaf

Jonathan Duddington (jsd@argonet.co.uk) wrote:
: I'm writing a bit of code to decode attachments to emails (and news items).

: What *exactly* is UUE encoding?
: What's the algorithm to encode and decode data?

You should be able to get source code for it fairly easily since its part
of all Unices. For a start, try something like ftp.netbsd.org pub/NetBSD/
NetBSD/current/src/bin/uuencode and ..../uudecode. Though it may not be
exactly right.... Its somewhere around there.

There might be an RFC describing it, you'd have to check an RFC index.

: UUE attachments to emails seem to be of the form:

: begin 644 <filename>
:  <UUE data>
: end

: is this always the case?

I think this is the standard way of doing it, yes. 644 refers to the Unix
file access permissions (in this case its something like owner read/read 
and group/other read only). This is useless on Risc OS systems, of course.

: I've seen two ways of including the RiscOS filetype.
: One is to put after the <filename> a comma followed by the filetype number,
: the other is an extra line after the "end" which is of the form:
:    RiscOS filetype : FFF

: Are there others?
: Are there other directives which a UUE decoder should recognise.

There are various different schemes which different readers/uuencoders
on different platforms seem to use. Its just a case of seeing what Arc
programs use and supporting it (or making one up), I suppose...

: And what is MIME? 
: Where can I find the definition?

Multi-Media Internet Mail Extensions. Its defined in a large number of RFCs.
grep and index for MIME and you should catch most of them.

Its a way of embedding various different encodings of data/text in e-mails.
One common way of encoding data with MIME is base 64. This is described
in an RFC somewhere.

sunsite has a complete set of rfs, in /rfc I believe...

Don't ls this directory though :-) Use ls *index* to find the index and
then use that.

They're heaving going.

--
alex@hayward.u-net.com; xelah@ferret.lmh.ox.ac.uk