A stupid and slighly long introduction
I wrote a pretty small online editor which allows me to easily change a couple of files on my webserver without having the need of using FTP.
Or so I thought.
The editor consists of a small form with a textarea and a submit button (oh and besides, for a little feeling of fake security, there is a password box :) ).
This form gets submitted to a Perl script which gets the form information through use CGI 'param' (because param is the only function of the CGI module I use).

The stupid problem
But the data from the textarea does not equal the data I entered. HTML entities like <,  , \ are changed by their actual characters.

A stupid solution
Of course I could write < in the editor (this would then render as < which is what I want) but then I should re-edit any HTML entities any time. As you can see, I don't quite feel like it.

The (stupid?) question
So my actual question(s): why does CGI eat them character entities? And how can I prevent it?
I could of course roll my own form parser, but that's, well, just stupid.

In reply to CGI module seems to eat html entities! by muba

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
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