[jiveturkey]

but html does not ignore line breaks. when part of body text, a run of whitespace (including newline) becomes a single whitespace when rendered.

so splitting 27.00 on the . becomes 27 00, because the CRLF is significant to the client.

you would want to split at whitespace, not at any other character -- unless you had a 999+ string of non-whitespace of course.

perhaps the author didn't know or didn't realize or thought it insignificant to his point that in addition there was a quoted-printable encoding, in which case i believe the trailing/mandatory CRLF can be made non significant for client rendering. personally i still would have split on actual whitespace. (well, i wouldn't have written an smtp client in the first place.)