I am trying to pull a PDF file out of a gmail message via IMAP, and write it to file on local disk.

I can successfully connect to gmail, search (and find) the message in question, grab it in its entirety as a string, and navigate to the attachment. Now I need to decode it, and write it to file. Here is that portion of my code:

my $str = $client->message_string($id) or die "$0: message_string: $@"
+;

Email::MIME->new($str)->walk_parts(sub {
    my($part) = @_;
    #Skip non-attachment parts
    return unless $part->content_type =~ /\bname="([^"]+)"/;
    #Keep the filename from the MIME info
    my $name = "$1";
    #No spaces in file names we're writing.
    $name =~ s/ /_/g;

    print "Writing $name...\n";
    #Open the file for writing
    open my $fh, ">", $name or die "$0: open $name: $!";
        my $blob = $part->body_raw;
        my $cleanPDF = decode_base64($blob);
        print $fh "$cleanPDF";
    close $fh or warn "$0: close $name: $!";
});

[download]

This writes a file, and it opens as a PDF. However, it's 3 blank pages.

Even more frustrating, if I just print '$blob' as a txt file, and copy the contents, I can use an online base64 decoder like this one: http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/dotnet/tools/base64decode/

And the resultant file opens as a PDF and has my content.

Any reason that decode_base64() is not returning a readable file? The file it does write is very close in size, (402KB vs 398KB for a good file), and kdiff reports that they're ascii-identical, but not binary-identical. All the readable parts match. I'm on Windows, using Perl 5.10.1 and MIME::Base64 version 3.13.

In reply to decode_base64 MIME PDF Failing by kiteskitesyay

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