Re: CGI URLs in HREFs

In article <v0310285eafee2a020172@[205.149.180.135]>,
Walter Ian Kaye <walter@natural-innovations.com> wrote:
> So, I guess I'll have to update my 'wiklib.pl' library to check for
> semicolons instead of just assuming ampersands. Now to come up with
> a good algorithm. 

My CGI library simply splits at & _or_ ;. I think this is safe, because
the & and ; characters must always be encoded if they're used as the
literal characters in the URL (RFC 1738, section 2.2 "Reserved"). A
valid query string will therefore always contain _either_ ; or &
unescaped, and then that character is the separator.

Of course, if someone manually GETs  something like
/cgi-bin/script?foo=bar;baz=quug&frop=wawa
then my script will see three arguments, yours will see two. But I'd
say the above query string is not valid, so we're both right. :-)

>   1. Count number of '='s in query string.
>   2. If more than one, determine whether '&' or ';' is used as field
>      separator:

Note that the above (invalid) query string has an equal number of ; and &
characters, so you don't know which one is correct.

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Received on Sunday, 13 July 1997 09:16:41 UTC