Perl has a real problem in that there are so many badly written CGI scripts around on the web and most people seem to pick up bad habits from them before finding places like perlmonks where they can get good advice. I'd be geniunely interested in hearing any ideas you have about how we can get to new Perl programmers and teach them good habits before they meet Matt Wright and his friends.

Your assumptions about CGI parameters are wrong. It is perfectly valid to have more than one value for each key. CGI.pm handles this by returning a list of values for multi-valued parameters. the older cgi-lib.pl handles it by returning a string where the values are separated by a \0 character. most hand-rolled solutions (like yours) handle it by trashing all but one of the values.

I apologise if my original post sounded too much like a flame. All I wanted to do was to point out that there are much better ways to do what you're doing and I hope that having been shown them, you will start to use them.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

European Perl Conference - Sept 22/24 2000, ICA, London
<http://www.yapc.org/Europe/>