character limit in cgi.pm param() function?

c has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: character limit in cgi.pm param() function? by cLive ;-) (Prior) on Oct 23, 2001 at 03:17 UTC
Only, AFAIK, if you use the GET method to submit the form. ie, use POST to avoid restrictions placed by query strings: `<FORM ACTION="whatever" METHOD="POST"> ... </FORM` [download] cLive ;-)	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: character limit in cgi.pm param() function? by czarfred (Beadle) on Oct 23, 2001 at 04:25 UTC
Yes, to be safe, use POST. This might explain in more detail (found here.): Using the get method allows the form submission to be contained completely in a URL. This can be advantageous in that it permits bookmarking in current browsers, but it also prevents form data from containing non-ASCII characters such as "é" and "©". As well, the amount of form data that can be handled by the get method is limited by the maximum length of the URL that the server and browser can process. To be safe, any form whose input might contain non-ASCII characters or more than 100 characters should use METHOD=post.	[reply]
Re: character limit in cgi.pm param() function? by cLive ;-) (Prior) on Oct 23, 2001 at 04:41 UTC
I just ran a test using © and é and get and it worked. Yes, non-ASCII chars are UU-encoded, but that doesn't mean they can't appear in the query string as UU-encoded chars. cLive ;-)	[reply]
Re: character limit in cgi.pm param() function? by fokat (Deacon) on Oct 23, 2001 at 05:31 UTC
I don't know if this is helpful, but a couple of years ago I found that Netscape and IE (both under Win32) were choking on a form that was quite complex and long. Testing showed that if the amount of data in the POST exceeded 64K, the browser would hang. We were unable to reproduce this under other OSes (FreeBSD and BDS/OS at the time). I assume this is not the case nowadays, but my advice is for you to do some testing before going ahead if your text is that large.	[reply]