CGI::Vars weirdness

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

hi monks,

I have a problem with CGI::Vars.

my $vars = $cgi->Vars;
print STDERR "CGI VARS: " . Dumper($vars) . "\n";

When I print out the key/value pairs of Vars, I see that '+' signs, wh
+ich must have been in the values have been translated to spaces:(. Th
+e rest of the characters are still excaped and they should have been.
+ Do you know why this weird behavior is showing and if there is a way
+ that I could  view the values in their raw format(no weird "+" sign 
+substitutions)?

I do not want to to run a regex that will substitute the " " with a "+
+". 

Thank you very much!
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Re: CGI::Vars weirdness by Joost (Canon) on Apr 04, 2008 at 02:04 UTC
+ is a valid encoding for space in the CGI/HTML form specs. IOW what you see is expected, and/or your input isn't supplied according to the specs. update: see this: `#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use CGI; print CGI->header(); print q(<form><input type="text" name="stuff"><input type="submit"></f +orm>); my %vars = CGI->new->Vars(); print "$_ => '$vars{$_}'<br>" for sort keys %vars;` [download] entering a + there in any conforming browser should give a + as the result. "What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: CGI::Vars weirdness by Anonymous Monk on Apr 04, 2008 at 08:00 UTC
`That is exatly what I want to see. When I enter a '+', I want to see t +he '+' in the CGI::Vars:( Alas! I did however forget to mention something important. I am using an Aja +x callback to submit the form. Could that be causing the problem?? <input type="button" name="mysubmit" value="Submit" onClick="myFunc([' +mytool', 'foo', 'bar'], ['result'], 'POST'); "/> Thanks again!` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: CGI::Vars weirdness by Corion (Patriarch) on Apr 04, 2008 at 08:27 UTC
Most likely, you will either need to properly encode your entities for the request (`escape()` function) or use a Ajax framework that properly encoded the entities for the request. As an aside, please put your "human" text into `<p>...</p>` tags and only your code into `<code>...</code>` tags. That way, it is far better readable for everybody.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: CGI::Vars weirdness by gam3 (Curate) on Apr 04, 2008 at 02:20 UTC
I am confused by you problem. If you would like to have the QUERY_STRING directly you can parse $ENV{QUERY_STRING}; `my @values = split(/&/,$ENV{QUERY_STRING}); foreach my $i (@values) { my ($name, $value) = split(/=/, $i); push(@{$keys{$name}}, $value); }` [download] Note that this has a slightly different structure that the structure ruturned by CGI::Vars. -- gam3 A picture is worth a thousand words, but takes 200K.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: CGI::Vars weirdness by chromatic (Archbishop) on Apr 04, 2008 at 05:38 UTC
The semicolon is also a valid separator for key-value pairs in URL-encoded query strings... but don't parse query strings by hand. You'll get it wrong.	[reply]
Re^3: CGI::Vars weirdness by ikegami (Patriarch) on Apr 04, 2008 at 06:50 UTC
Not quite. "`;`" is a valid separator for HTTP URLs, but not for application/x-www-form-urlencoded (i.e. form) data. In other words, you may assign URLs any meaning you wish to "`;`" in URLs to resources you control, but it's by no means equivalent to "`&`" unless you choose it to be for those resources. You shouldn't impose your choice as fact onto others.	[reply] [d/l] [select]