Hello, I have a webservice that's taking in parameters via CGI. If one of those parameters has a special character (& for example), it gets sent in as %26. If I immediately print out the contents of param('data'), it prints to the screen with &, not %26. This is causing me a problem because I am calculating an hmac_sha512_hex value to verify that the input is getting received as sent. On the JavaScript side I set each parameter with encodeURIComponent(), which is how it's getting %26, then I read all of those to create the hash. On the Perl side, it's calculating it with the &, instead of %26. Is there a way to access the true raw input? I only need it to validate this one part - that the hash_hmac from PHP matches the hmac_sha512_hex from Perl. Here's the basic of the Perl script for this portion: 
my $raw_data =  uri_unescape $query->param('data');
my $api_key = uri_unescape $query->param('api_key');
$sth = $user_dbh->prepare($get_secret_key);
$sth->execute($user_id);
my ($secret_key) = $sth->fetchrow_array() and $sth->finish();
...
if($api_key eq hmac_sha512_hex($raw_data.$xyz.$abc,$secret_key))
    {
        $auth_services{$service}->();
    }else{
        $status_ref->{'status'}             = "FAIL";
        $status_ref->{'status_cd'}         = "F";
        $status_ref->{'message'}             = "Login details unable t
+o be confirmed";
        $status_ref->{'response_cd'}     = "401";
    }

[download]
Thanks!

In reply to CGI Input with Escaped Characters by hoyt

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