I think I know what is happening but still haven't figured out the solution. First I stripped down the code to use CGI without any of our in house packages. What I discovered is that CGI is interpreting the semicolon as a delimiter of the parameter list sent to the web server. So basically every time the webserver received a semicolon from the client its interpreting it as 'Hey I'm a new parameter!'. I added the line: 
use CGI qw(-oldstyle_urls);

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hoping that it would not see the semicolon as a delimiter, but that didn't work. Here is a dump of the CGI object: 
$VAR1 = bless( {
                 'strerrortext' => [
                                     'strerror'
                                   ],
                 'strxmltext' => [
                                   '<testproblem>ti'
                                 ],
                 '.parameters' => [
                                    'strxmltext',
                                    'me</testproblem>',
                                    'strerrortext'
                                  ],
                 'me</testproblem>' => [
                                         ''
                                       ],
                 '.charset' => 'ISO-8859-1',
                 '.fieldnames' => {},
                 'escape' => 1
               }, 'CGI' );

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The semicolon is located in the tag testproblem: 
 
<testproblem>ti;me</testproblem>

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As you can see from the parameter list, CGI is interpreting the text after the semicolon as a parameter. Any other thoughts?

In reply to Re^4: Semicolons in webforms by dmaranan
in thread Semicolons in webforms by dmaranan

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