Folks,

I'm writing mail-processing programs that need to take incoming emails and store them for later use. The part I'm trying to nail down right now is interpreting Unicode strings correctly. Here's a little snippet of a program to read an incoming message in the usual (RFC822) format:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Mail::Audit;
use MIME::Words qw(decode_mimewords);
use Encode;

open my $out, '>:utf8', "/some/file.txt";
my $mail = new Mail::Audit;
my $subj = $mail->get('Subject');
$subj = decode_utf8 decode_mimewords($subj);
print $out "$subj\n";

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The part that seems odd to me is the decode_utf8 part. I wasn't expecting to need that. But if I don't have it, I get the wrong output. For example, here is the raw version of the relevant field (the word in question is the Russian word for "Russian", ie. Русский): 

Subject: =?UTF-8?B?0KDRg9GB0YHQutC40Lk=?=

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If I run my program on it without the decode_utf8 part, I get 
Π ΡΡΡΠΊΠΈΠΉ

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whereas with it, I get the result I want. Am I doing something wrong here, or do I just misunderstand how these modules work?

In reply to reading Base64 encoded Unicode email returns mangled text by Errto

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