February 3, 2026
When '=' breaks the internet
What's up with all those equals signs anyway?
Those weird '=' in leaked emails? Not a code—just a sloppy copy job, says HN
TLDR: Those '=' littering leaked emails aren’t a secret code—they’re leftovers from an old email format, botched during line-ending conversion. HN piled on: one-liner fixes, debates over why email lines must be short, and jokes about the site crashing, all roasting sloppy processing.
Twitter got flooded with screenshots of old emails sprinkled with mysterious '=' signs, and the internet went full Da Vinci Code. Enter the Hacker News crowd, who showed up with receipts and snark: it’s just quoted‑printable, an old email trick where '=' means “this line continues,” and sometimes encodes fancy characters like non‑breaking space (=C2=A0). Translation: not spies, just sloppy copy-paste. The vibe? Roasting season. One commenter dropped the mic with a one‑liner: “TLDR ‘=\r\n’ became ‘=\n’,” explaining how a Windows line ending (carriage return + line feed) got turned into a Unix one (just line feed), leaving zombie equals signs in the text. Another asked the forbidden question—why do emails still limit line length at all?—and suddenly we had a mini‑flamewar over ancient standards vs modern common sense. Meanwhile, the thread turned meta when someone asked if the original blog had suffered the HN kiss of death, posting a Web Archive link. The chorus: “Quoted unreadable,” “garbage in, garbage out,” and a collective eye‑roll at whoever processed the emails. Equal signs, unequal rage; the community solved the mystery and made memes out of the mess.
Key Points
- •Equals signs in email excerpts come from quoted-printable encoding’s soft line breaks, written as “=CRLF”.
- •Converting CRLF to LF (NL) before decoding and using naive algorithms can leave “=” in text or remove adjacent characters.
- •Equals signs also denote hex-encoded bytes; e.g., “=C2=A0” represents a UTF-8 non-breaking space commonly used for indentation.
- •Artifacts are not caused by OCR or secret codes; they result from improper email conversion and decoding.
- •Proper decoding requires honoring quoted-printable rules, correct line-ending handling, and using robust decoders rather than search-replace.