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How to decode an encoded email header with a Python one-liner

Tue, 2012.06.12 - 15:10 — müzso
Let's take this encoded email subject as an example:
=?UTF-8?B?U3plbcOpbHllcyBZb3VUdWJlLcOpcnRlc8OtdMWRIC0gMjAxMS4xMi4yOC4==?=
Feed it into this one-liner:
python -c "from email.header import decode_header; import sys; subject, encoding = decode_header(sys.stdin.readline())[0]; print subject if encoding == None else subject.decode(encoding)"
It'll read a single line from it's standard input (you can pipe in the encoded line or enter or copy&paste manually) and print the decoded form. In this example it'll print Személyes YouTube-értesítő - 2011.12.28..

If your header field (eg. subject) spans multiple lines in the email header, just concatenate/join together the lines and feed the result into the above decoder.

P.S.: of course you can use the same routine for any other header line, not just subjects.