StackOverflow2013

Note that there are some explanatory texts on larger screens.

plurals

POPreserve plus signs from CGI input in Perl
text
Body
copied!<p>I'm working on a web application with several forms on which the user is expected to input data often containing spaces and/or plus signs.</p> <p>The data is generally sent either through <code>GET</code> requests; or through <code>POST</code> requests with a <code>application/x-www-form-urlencoded</code> Content-Type header.</p> <p>I have tried using either <code>Vars()</code> and <code>param</code> from Perl's <code>CGI</code> module, but both of these methods insist on converting the <code>+</code> signs into spaces.</p> <p>Does the <code>CGI</code> module provide any mechanism to preserve the <code>+</code> signs; or should I ditch <code>CGI</code> and manually parse the <code>STDIN</code> input?</p> <p><strong>Note</strong>:<br> With the large amount of forms (over the hundred), and having the CGI pre-processing happening in a centralized utility library, I'm quite biased towards a server-side solution rather than a client-side approach (in other words, I'd rather deal with the problem once on the pre-processing code once than adding JS noise on hundreds of places).</p> <p>Thanks in advance for any help provided.</p> <p><strong>Example</strong>:<br> As requested in the comments, here is a (simplified) sample of some code that triggers the issue.</p> <p><strong>HTML</strong></p> <pre><code><form action="/cgi-bin/some-script.pl"> <input name="some_field" value="1 + 1 is 2"> <input name="submit" type="submit" value="Submit"> </form> </code></pre> <p><strong>Perl</strong></p> <pre><code>use CGI; my $some_variable = CGI::param('some_field'); </code></pre> <p>After submiting the form with the default value and running the server-side code, <code>$some_variable</code>'s value is <code>"1 1 is 2"</code> <em>(there are three spaces between the 1's, either the SO site or the browser may be collapsing them into a single space)</em>; the <strong>desired outcome</strong> would be to get the value <code>"1 + 1 is 2"</code> in that variable.</p>

Querying!

Guidance

An individual column

Larger individual text columns get their own page to allow for proper reading.

SQuiL has stopped working due to an internal error.

If you are curious you may find further information in the browser console, which is accessible through the devtools (F12).

Reload