MIME::Entity - class for parsed-and-decoded MIME message
Create a MIME entity from an array, and output it as a MIME stream to STDOUT:
$ent = new MIME::Entity [ "Subject: Greetings\n", "Content-type: text/plain\n", "Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit\n", "\n", "Hi there!\n", "Bye there!\n" ]; $ent->print(\*STDOUT);
Create a document for an ordinary 7-bit ASCII text file (lots of stuff is defaulted for us):
$ent = build MIME::Entity Path=>"english-msg.txt";
Create a document for a text file with 8-bit (Latin-1) characters:
$ent = build MIME::Entity Path =>"french-msg.txt", Encoding =>"quoted-printable";
Create a document for a GIF file (the description is completely optional, and note that we have to specify content-type and encoding since they're not the default values):
$ent = build MIME::Entity Description => "A pretty picture", Path => "./docs/mime-sm.gif", Type => "image/gif", Encoding => "base64";
Create a document that you already have the text for:
$ent = build MIME::Entity Type => "text/plain", Encoding => "quoted-printable", Data => [ "First line.\n", "Second line.\n", "Last line.\n", ];
Create a multipart message (could it be much easier?)
# Create the top-level, and set up the mail headers: $top = build MIME::Entity Type=>"multipart/mixed"; $top->head->add('from', "me\@myhost.com"); $top->head->add('to', "you\@yourhost.com"); $top->head->add('subject', "Hello, nurse!"); # Attachment #1: a simple text document: attach $top Path=>"./testin/short.txt"; # Attachment #2: a GIF file: attach $top Path => "./docs/mime-sm.gif", Type => "image/gif", Encoding => "base64"; # Attachment #3: text we'll create with text we have on-hand: attach $top Data=>$contents; # Output! $top->print(\*STDOUT);
Extract information from MIME entities:
# Get the head, a MIME::Head: $head = $ent->head; # Get the body, as a MIME::Body; $bodyh = $ent->bodyhandle;
See MIME::Parser for additional examples of usage.
A subclass of Mail::Internet.
This package provides a class for representing MIME message entities, as specified in RFC 1521, Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions.
Here are some excerpts from RFC-1521 explaining the terminology: each is accompanied by the equivalent in MIME:: terms:
From RFC-1521:
The term "message", when not further qualified, means either the (complete or "top-level") message being transferred on a network, or a message encapsulated in a body of type "message".
There currently is no explicit package for messages; under MIME::, messages may be read in from readable files or filehandles. A future extension will allow them to be read from any object reference that responds to a special "next line" method.
The term "body part", in this document, means one of the parts of the body of a multipart entity. A body part has a header and a body, so it makes sense to speak about the body of a body part.
Since a body part is just a kind of entity (see below), a body part is represented by an instance of MIME::Entity.
The term "entity", in this document, means either a message or a body part. All kinds of entities share the property that they have a header and a body.
An entity is represented by an instance of MIME::Entity. There are instance methods for recovering the header (a MIME::Head) and the body (see below).
The term "body", when not further qualified, means the body of an entity, that is the body of either a message or of a body part.
Well, this is a toughie. Both Mail::Internet (1.17) and Mail::MIME (1.03) represent message bodies in-core; unfortunately, this is not always the best way to handle things, especially for MIME streams that contain multi-megabyte tar files.
Class method. Create a new, empty MIME entity. Basically, this uses the Mail::Internet constructor...
If SOURCE is an ARRAYREF, it is assumed to be an array of lines that will be used to create both the header and an in-core body.
Else, if SOURCE is defined, it is assumed to be a filehandle from which the header and in-core body is to be read.
Note: in either case, the body will not be parsed: merely read!
Class/instance method. A quick-and-easy catch-all way to create an entity. Use it like this to build a "normal" single-part entity:
$ent = build MIME::Entity Type => "image/gif", Encoding => "base64", Path => "/path/to/xyz12345.gif", Filename => "saveme.gif";
And like this to build a "multipart" entity:
$ent = build MIME::Entity Type => "multipart/mixed", Boundary => "---1234567";
A minimal MIME header will be created. The params are:
Multipart entities only. Optional. The boundary string. If you omit this, a random string will be chosen... which is probably safer.
Single-part entities only. Optional. An alternative to Path (q.v.): the actual data, either as a scalar or an array reference (whose elements are joined together to make the actual scalar). The body is opened on the data using MIME::Body::Scalar.
Optional. The text of the content-description. If you don't specify it, the field is not put in the header.
Optional. The content-transfer-encoding. If you don't specify it, the field is not put in the header... which means that the encoding implicitly defaults to "7bit" as per RFC-1521. Do yourself a favor: put it in.
"7bit"
Single-part entities only. Optional. The recommended filename. Overrides any name extracted from Path. The information is stored both the deprecated (content-type) and preferred (content-disposition) locations.
Path
Single-part entities only. Optional. The path to the file to attach. The body is opened on that file using MIME::Body::File.
Optional. Is this a top-level entity? If so, it must sport a MIME-Version. The default is true.
Optional. The content-type. If you don't specify it, it defaults to "text/plain" as per RFC-1521. Do yourself a favor: put it in.
"text/plain"
Assuming we are a multipart message, add a body part (a MIME::Entity) to the array of body parts. Do not call this for single-part messages; i.e., don't call it unless the header has a "multipart" content-type.
"multipart"
Returns the part that was just added.
The real quick-and-easy way to create multipart messages. Basically equivalent to:
$entity->add_part(ref($entity)->build(PARAMHASH));
Except that it's a lot nicer to look at.
Get or set the path to the file containing the body.
If VALUE is not given, the current body file is returned. If VALUE is given, the body file is set to the new value, and the previous value is returned.
VALUE
Get or set the body, as an array of lines. This should be regarded as a read-only data structure: changing its contents will have unpredictable results (you can, of course, make your own copy, and work with that).
Provided for compatibility with Mail::Internet, and it might not be as efficient as you'd like. Also, it's somewhat silly/wrongheaded for binary bodies, like GIFs and tar files.
Both forms are deprecated for MIME entities: instead, use the bodyhandle() method to get and use a MIME::Body. The content-type of the entity will tell you whether that body is best read as text (via getline()) or raw data (via read()).
Get or set an abstract object representing the body.
If VALUE is not given, the current bodyhandle is returned. If VALUE is given, the bodyhandle is set to the new value, and the previous value is returned.
Dump the skeleton of the entity to the given FILEHANDLE, or to the currently-selected one if none given. This is really just useful for debugging purposes.
Get/set the head.
If there is no VALUE given, returns the current head. If none exists, an empty instance of MIME::Head is created, set, and returned.
Note: This is a patch over a bug in Mail::Internet, which doesn't provide a method for setting the head to some given object.
Does this entity's MIME type indicate that it's a multipart entity? Returns undef (false) if the answer couldn't be determined, 0 (false) if it was determined to be false, and true otherwise.
Note that this says nothing about whether or not parts were extracted.
A purely-for-convenience method. This simply relays the request to the associated MIME::Head object. The following are identical:
$x = $entity->mime_type; $x = $entity->head->mime_type;
If there is no head, returns undef in a scalar context and the empty array in a list context.
Note that, while parsed entities still have MIME types, they do not have MIME encodings, or MIME versions, or fields, etc., etc... for those attributes, you still have to go to the head explicitly.
Return an array of all sub parts (each of which is a MIME::Entity), or the empty array if there are none.
For single-part messages, the empty array will be returned. For multipart messages, the preamble and epilogue parts are not in the list!
Note that in a scalar context, this returns you the number of parts.
Instance method, override. Print the entity to the given FILEHANDLE, or to the currently-selected one if none given.
If a single-part entity, the header and the body are both output, with the body being output according to the encoding specified by the header.
If a multipart entity, this is invoked recursively on all its parts, with appropriate boundaries and a preamble generated for you.
See print_body() for an important note on how the body is output.
print_body()
Instance method, override. Print the body of the entity to the given FILEHANDLE, or to the currently-selected one if none given.
Important note: the body is output according to the encoding specified by the header ('binary' if no encoding given). This means that the following code:
'binary'
$ent = new MIME::Entity ["Subject: Greetings\n", "Content-transfer-encoding: base64\n", "\n", "Hi there!\n", "Bye there!\n" ]; $ent->print; # uses print_body() internally
Prints this:
Subject: Greetings Content-transfer-encoding: base64 SGkgdGhlcmUhCkJ5ZSB0aGVyZSEK
The body is stored in an unencoded form; however, the idea is that the transfer encoding is used to determine how it should be output. This means that the print() method is always guaranteed to get you a sendmail-ready stream whose body is consistent with its head.
print()
If you want the raw body data to be output, you can either read it from the bodyhandle yourself, or use:
$ent->bodyhandle->print;
which uses read() calls to extract the information, and thus will work with both text and binary bodies.
A MIME::Entity is composed of the following elements:
A head, which is a reference to a MIME::Head object containing the header information.
A bodyhandle, which is a reference a MIME::Body object containing the decoded body data. (In pre-2.0 releases, this was accessed via body, which was a path to a file containing the decoded body. Integration with Mail::Internet has forced this to change.)
A list of zero or more parts, each of which is a MIME::Entity object. The number of parts will only be nonzero if the content-type is some subtype of "multipart".
Note that, in 2.0+, a multipart entity does not have a body. Of course, any/all of its component parts can have bodies.
In multipart messages, the "preamble" is the portion that precedes the first encapsulation boundary, and the "epilogue" is the portion that follows the last encapsulation boundary.
According to RFC-1521:
There appears to be room for additional information prior to the first encapsulation boundary and following the final boundary. These areas should generally be left blank, and implementations must ignore anything that appears before the first boundary or after the last one. NOTE: These "preamble" and "epilogue" areas are generally not used because of the lack of proper typing of these parts and the lack of clear semantics for handling these areas at gateways, particularly X.400 gateways. However, rather than leaving the preamble area blank, many MIME implementations have found this to be a convenient place to insert an explanatory note for recipients who read the message with pre-MIME software, since such notes will be ignored by MIME-compliant software.
In the world of standards-and-practices, that's the standard. Now for the practice:
Some "MIME" mailers may incorrectly put a "part" in the preamble. Since we have to parse over the stuff anyway, in the future I may allow the parser option of creating special MIME::Entity objects for the preamble and epilogue, with bogus MIME::Head objects.
For now, though, we're MIME-compliant, so I probably won't change how we work.
MIME::Decoder, MIME::Entity, MIME::Head, MIME::Parser.
Copyright (c) 1996 by Eryq / eryq@rhine.gsfc.nasa.gov
All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
$Revision: 2.8 $ $Date: 1996/11/03 00:19:30 $
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