RE: GET / POST query

POST specifies that the FORM information will be sent via stdin rather than
the QUERY_STRING variable.

Older web servers had a limit on how big the QUERY_STRING could be, usually
about 256 characters.  Therefore, if your FORM information was too big, you
would need to use stdin to pass the name-value pairs into the cgi program.
More modern web servers have much higher limits, sometimes several kbytes.
Check your web server's documentation.

To read from stdin, first use the CONTENT_LENGTH variable to determine how
much to read in.  In C, it looks something like:

int  length;
int  i;
char  c;
char  buffer  [ SIZE ];

length = getenv( "CONTENT_LENGTH");

for( i=0; i < length; i++) {
  if( c = fgetc(stdin) == EOF)
      break;
  buffer[i] = c;
} 

Hope this helps,

John Fenner

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Jayesh Govindarajan [SMTP:jayeshg@WPI.EDU]
> Sent:	Tuesday, June 23, 1998 3:24 AM
> To:	www-talk@w3.org
> Subject:	GET / POST query
> 
> 
> Hi ! all
> 
> I have a quick question. 
> 
> I know that if there is a GET method specified in the HTML form as the
> means of communication between the client and the server then one can use
> the URL(with special strings and the query in it) to retrieve the HTML
> page via a java program.
> 
> Is there anyway one can communicate with a gateway program via a java
> applet if the gateway program handles POST requests as opposed to GET. In
> otherwords how do u communicate with a GAteway (CGI) program that does not
> get its data via a URL ?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Jayesh.

Received on Tuesday, 23 June 1998 08:42:14 UTC