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From: "Richard M. Stallman" <rms@gnu.org>
Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel
Subject: Re: Need some help with Rmail/mbox
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 00:30:57 -0400
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In-reply-to: <lu8wtp1lys.fsf@pajato.com> (message from Paul Michael Reilly on
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Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:103965
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    As near as I can tell the task is to decode the message body in two
    steps: first to decode according to the character encoding
    (e.g. quoted-printable or base64) and then to decode that result to
    some coding system.

That is correct.

			 Something along the lines of:

	 (let (body)
	   (setq body (apply qp or base64 to body of message)

You call `mail-unquote-printable-region' or  `base64-decode-region'.
They operate on the buffer.

	   (decode-coding-string body (detect-coding-string body t))

Use `decode-coding-region'.  It operates on the buffer.

When operating on large amount of text, don't do it in strings.