the boundary parameter, which consists of 1 to 70 characters from a
set of characters known to be very robust through mail gateways, and
NOT ending with white space. (If a boundary delimiter line appears to
end with white space, the white space must be presumed to have been
added by a gateway, and must be deleted.) It is formally specified
by the following BNF:
boundary := 0*69 bcharsnospace
bchars := bcharsnospace / " "
bcharsnospace := DIGIT / ALPHA / "'" / "(" / ")" /
"+" / "_" / "," / "-" / "." /
"/" / ":" / "=" / "?"
Overall, the body of a "multipart" entity may be specified as
follows:
dash-boundary := "--" boundary
; boundary taken from the value of
; boundary parameter of the
; Content-Type field.
multipart-body := [preamble CRLF]
dash-boundary transport-padding CRLF
body-part *encapsulation
close-delimiter transport-padding
[CRLF epilogue]
RFC 2046 Media Types November 1996
transport-padding := *LWSP-char
; Composers MUST NOT generate
; non-zero length transport
; padding, but receivers MUST
; be able to handle padding
; added by message transports.
encapsulation := delimiter transport-padding
CRLF body-part
delimiter := CRLF dash-boundary
close-delimiter := delimiter "--"
preamble := discard-text
epilogue := discard-text
discard-text := *(*text CRLF) *text
; May be ignored or discarded.
body-part := MIME-part-headers [CRLF *OCTET]
; Lines in a body-part must not start
; with the specified dash-boundary and
; the delimiter must not appear anywhere
; in the body part. Note that the
; semantics of a body-part differ from
; the semantics of a message, as
; described in the text.
OCTET := <any 0-255 octet value>
IMPORTANT: The free insertion of linear-white-space and RFC 822
comments between the elements shown in this BNF is NOT allowed since
this BNF does not specify a structured header field.
NOTE: In certain transport enclaves, RFC 822 restrictions such as
the one that limits bodies to printable US-ASCII characters may not
be in force. (That is, the transport domains may exist that resemble
standard Internet mail transport as specified in RFC 821 and assumed
by RFC 822, but without certain restrictions.) The relaxation of
these restrictions should be construed as locally extending the
definition of bodies, for example to include octets outside of the
US-ASCII range, as long as these extensions are supported by the
transport and adequately documented in the Content- Transfer-Encoding
header field. However, in no event are headers (either message
headers or body part headers) allowed to contain anything other than
US-ASCII characters.
RFC 2046 Media Types November 1996
NOTE: Conspicuously missing from the "multipart" type is a notion of
structured, related body parts. It is recommended that those wishing
to provide more structured or integrated multipart messaging
facilities should define subtypes of multipart that are syntactically
identical but define relationships between the various parts. For
example, subtypes of multipart could be defined that include a
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