NAME

MIME::Field::ContType - a "Content-type" field

DESCRIPTION

A subclass of Mail::Field.

Don't use this class directly... its name may change in the future! Instead, ask Mail::Field for new instances based on the field name!

SYNOPSIS

    use Mail::Field;
    use MIME::Head;
    
    # Create an instance from some text:
    $field = Mail::Field->new('Content-type', 
                              'text/HTML; charset="US-ASCII"');
    
    # Get the MIME type, like 'text/plain' or 'x-foobar'.
    # Returns 'text/plain' as default, as per RFC-1521:
    my ($type, $subtype) = split('/', $field->type);

    # Get generic information:
    print $field->name;
    
    # Get information related to "message" type:
    if ($type eq 'message') {
	print $field->id;
	print $field->number;
	print $field->total;
    }
    
    # Get information related to "multipart" type:
    if ($type eq 'multipart') {
	print $field->boundary;            # the basic value, fixed up
	print $field->multipart_boundary;  # empty if not a multipart message!
    }
    
    # Get information related to "text" type:
    if ($type eq 'text') {
	print $field->charset;      # returns 'us-ascii' as default
    }     

NOTES

Since nearly all (if not all) parameters must have non-empty values to be considered valid, we just return the empty string to signify missing fields. If you need to get the real underlying value, use the inherited param() method (which returns undef if the parameter is missing).

PUBLIC INTERFACE

boundary

Return the boundary field. The boundary is returned exactly as given in the Content-type: field; that is, the leading double-hyphen (--) is not prepended.

(Well, almost exactly... from RFC-1521:

(If a boundary appears to end with white space, the white space 
must be presumed to have been added by a gateway, and must be deleted.)  

so we oblige and remove any trailing spaces.)

Returns the empty string if there is no boundary, or if the boundary is illegal (e.g., if it is empty after all trailing whitespace has been removed).

multipart_boundary

Like boundary(), except that this will also return the empty string if the message is not a multipart message. In other words, there's an automatic sanity check.

type

Try real hard to determine the content type (e.g., "text/plain", "image/gif", "x-weird-type", which is returned in all-lowercase.

A happy thing: the following code will work just as you would want, even if there's no subtype (as in "x-weird-type")... in such a case, the $subtype would simply be the empty string:

($type, $subtype) = split('/', $head->mime_type);

If the content-type information is missing, it defaults to "text/plain", as per RFC-1521:

Default RFC-822 messages are typed by this protocol as plain text in
the US-ASCII character set, which can be explicitly specified as
"Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii".  If no Content-Type is
specified, this default is assumed.  

If just the subtype is missing (a syntax error unless the type begins with "x-", but we'll tolerate it, since some brain-dead mailers actually do this), then it simply is not reported; e.g., "Content-type: TEXT" is returned simply as "text".

If the content type is present but can't be parsed at all (yow!), the empty string is returned.