Every so often someone will email me something where the subject has unicode in it. My naive tools don't know what to do with it, and I see stuff like:

=?UTF-8?Q?[Sociological_Images]_New_Comment_On:_Satter=E2=80=99s_Hierarch?=  =?UTF-8?Q?y_of_Food_Needs?=

It turns out python has a module for this, providing email.header.decode_header. This gives me:

[Sociological_Images] New Comment On: Satter's Hierarchy of Food Needs

So much nicer.

I am continually happily surprised at the fraction of the time that what I want is already implemented in the python standard library.