Be warned! The method below for encoding text does not work as requested by RFC1521!
Consider a line consisting of 75 'A' and a single é (or similar non-ASCII character) ... the method below would encode and return a line of 78 octets, breaking with RFC 1521, 5.1 Rule #5: "The Quoted-Printable encoding REQUIRES that encoded lines be no more than 76 characters long."
Good QP-encoding takes a bit more than this.