How to avoid URL-Encoding in LWP POST Request

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

Hello Monks, I want to send a POST Request to a website without URL-encoding of square brackets.

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
my $res = $ua->request(POST "http://www.example.com/test.php",
[ "var1" => "foo",
  "var2" => "bar",
  "var3[id]" => "foobar"
]);
[download]

The third variable must be submitted with real square brackets, not %5B and %5D. Otherwise the web application will not understand the request. Default behavior is to URL-encode them and I have not found a way to avoid this. Can anyone tell me how I can deactivate automatic URL encoding in variable names?

Thanks in advance, Angeldust

Comment on How to avoid URL-Encoding in LWP POST Request Download Code

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Re: How to avoid URL-Encoding in LWP POST Request by Anonymous Monk on Nov 24, 2008 at 04:20 UTC
Otherwise the web application will not understand the request. That web application is broken(using broken HTTP/CGI library). Can anyone tell me how I can deactivate automatic URL encoding in variable names? Since LWP exist to do the encoding, the simplest way is not to use LWP.	[reply]
Re^2: How to avoid URL-Encoding in LWP POST Request by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Nov 24, 2008 at 17:21 UTC
Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, I hope, but I think this is not correct. I believe the requirement to encode brackets and parens and a few other chars is relatively new (added to the specs in 2005 if I searched right) and therefore there is going to be code in the wild that still uses the old behavior which makes it no more broken than HTML v XHTML. Confusing and problematic, but not broken. ++ to almut below for showing how to handle it in this case.	[reply]
Re^3: How to avoid URL-Encoding in LWP POST Request by Anonymous Monk on Nov 25, 2008 at 01:53 UTC
RFC 1738 Uniform Resource Locators (URL) December 1994	[reply]
Re^4: How to avoid URL-Encoding in LWP POST Request by Your Mother (Archbishop) on Nov 25, 2008 at 06:44 UTC
Re^5: How to avoid URL-Encoding in LWP POST Request by Anonymous Monk on Nov 25, 2008 at 07:41 UTC
Re: How to avoid URL-Encoding in LWP POST Request by almut (Canon) on Nov 24, 2008 at 16:50 UTC
A quick look at the source (`HTTP/Request/Common.pm`) reveals that if you pass a pre-formatted query string like this: `#!/usr/bin/perl use LWP::UserAgent; my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new(); my $response = $ua->post("http://www.example.com", Content => 'var1=foo&var2=bar&var3[id]=foobar' );` [download] it will not be touched any further by LWP. In other words, the square brackets will be sent literally in this case. (Tested)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: How to avoid URL-Encoding in LWP POST Request by nuclon (Acolyte) on Nov 24, 2008 at 14:26 UTC
You can try this: `my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new(); my $res = $ua->request(POST "http://www.example.com" Content_Type => 'form-data', Content => [ "var1" => "foo", "var2" => "bar", "var3[id]" => "foobar" ]);` [download] But it seems you have broken web-application, which cannot parse requests well. Do you use CGI.pm for it?	[reply] [d/l]