Perl

Get a MIME Header Field Value

Demonstrates the Chilkat Mime.GetHeaderField method, which returns the value of the first header field whose name matches case-insensitively. The only argument is the field name; it returns null when no matching field exists.

Note: The file path is relative to the application's current working directory. Absolute paths may also be used. Supply the path to your own file.

Background: This is the everyday way to read a header value — the Subject, a Message-ID, a custom X- header. Because a missing field returns null, the returned value is assigned to a variable and checked rather than used directly, so an absent header is handled cleanly instead of surfacing as an error later. Only the first matching occurrence is returned; iterate by index to see duplicates.

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Chilkat2 Perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Chilkat2;

my $mime = Chilkat2::Mime->new;
my $success = $mime->LoadMimeFile('qa_data/message.eml');
if (!$success) {
    print $mime->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}

# Return the value of the first header field with a matching (case-insensitive) name.
# GetHeaderField returns null when no matching field exists, so assign it to a string variable
# and check for success.
my $subject = $mime->GetHeaderField('Subject');
if (!$mime->LastMethodSuccess) {
    print $mime->LastErrorText, "\n";
    exit;
}

print 'Subject: ', $subject, "\n";