Quoted-printable encoding (somtimes QP) involves using US-ASCII 7-bits encoding (non-accented letters) to encode a text that requires an alphabet of 8-bit characters (accented letters), such as ISO-Latin-1, which is used for most Western European languages.
With quoted-printable encoding, the standard characters, which in ASCII code run from 33 to 127 (except for the equal sign, which is code 61), are encoded using the 7-bit US-ASCII code.
8-bit special or accented characters (Ã , Ã©, Ã§, Ã¶, Ã±, etc.) are encoded using the equal sign, followed by two hexadecimal digits. Below is the quoted-printable encoding for common special characters:
With quoted-printable encoding, text must be divided so that no line contains more than 76 characters.