
This module is BETA code, which means that the interfaces are fairly stable BUT it has not been out in the community long enough to guarantee much testing. Use with caution! Please report any errors back to eryq@zeegee.com as soon as you can.
 NAME
 NAMEMIME::Field::ContType - a "Content-type" field
 DESCRIPTION
 DESCRIPTIONA 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
 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
    }     
 PUBLIC INTERFACE
 PUBLIC INTERFACEContent-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).
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.
"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.  
Note: under the "be liberal in what we accept" principle, this routine no longer syntax-checks the content type. If it ain't empty, just downcase and return it.
 NOTES
 NOTESSince 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).
 AUTHOR
 AUTHOREryq (