kleinbiker7 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hey guys, I am not very familiar with URL encoding, and could do with some help here! Basically, I need to take a massive GET string (one that the server will reject) and transform it into a GET string with the proper length, so that it will be accepted.

Then it will be decoded. What is a simple way to do this, so that we can pass huge query strings to the server?

Thanks!

  • Comment on How do I shorten/encode huge GET strings?

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Re: How do I shorten/encode huge GET strings?
by duff (Parson) on May 21, 2004 at 18:28 UTC
    Must you use GET? POST is better suited for large submissions.

    And what makes your QUERY_STRING so large? Do you have lots of name=value pairs that aren't used or have nothing as a value?

    duff

[reply]
Re: How do I shorten/encode huge GET strings?
by Wonko the sane (Curate) on May 21, 2004 at 18:33 UTC
    Hello,

    I am not sure what you mean by shortening the GET string. If you have alot of data, a POST may be better suited.

    This is what I usually do when I need to encode a hash of data to use in a GET request though.

    sub _url_encode_data 
{   
    my ( $data ) = @_;   
    
    my $post_string;
    
    foreach my $field ( keys %$data ) 
    {
        next if ( $data->{$field} eq '' );
    
        $data->{$field} =~ s/([^a-zA-Z0-9_\-.])/uc sprintf("%%%02x",or
+d($1))/eg;
    
        $post_string .= "$field=$data->{$field}&";
    }
    
    return $post_string;
    
} # END _url_encode_data

    [download]
    There may be a better way to do this(of course).

    Hope that helps though.

    Wonko

[reply]
[d/l]

      There are several wheels for this on CPAN already 

      use CGI::Enurl;

$url = 'script.pl?' . enurl($hashref);

      [download]

      Jenda
      Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
         -- Rick Osborne

      Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature

[reply]
[d/l]
      Cheers Wonko...I will try that... By the way, how do you decode that string after you passed it to the server? Thanks!
[reply]
        use the URI package.
        It will allow you to easily break apart (or assemble) any url including the query form with all special character sequences converted.
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