Re: Hyperlink to act like submit button...

[fliptop]

Aaron Craig wrote:
> 
> At 18.07 24/07/2001 -0700, you wrote:
> 
> I may be mistaken here, but:
> 
> <a href="http://www.foo.bar/script.cgi?page=1&amp=2&quot=4";>
>          &quot;&amp;&quot;
> </a>
> 
> should parse exactly as one would expect, with no error correction involved
> because
> 
> &amp;
> 
> is a legal HTML entity
> 
> &amp (no final semi-colon)
> 
> is just a string

ok, last year at yapc in pittsburgh randal mentioned this in one of his
talks.  afterward i experimented with it some and discovered he is
right.  without encoding, things do not behave as one would expect.

here's a perl script i used:


#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI;
my $cgi = new CGI;
print $cgi->header();
foreach ($cgi->param()) { print "$_: ", $cgi->param($_), "<br>"; }
exit();


and here are several query strings i tried and the results in a browser:

<a href="/cgi-bin/script.cgi?name=fliptop&amp;dog=mutt">Click to
test</a>

name: fliptop
dog: mutt

<a href="/cgi-bin/script.cgi?name=fliptop&dog=mutt">Click here</a>

name: fliptop
dog: mutt

<a href="/cgi-bin/script.cgi?name=fliptop&amp=ampersand">Click here</a>

name: fliptop
: ampersand

(in fact, when you roll over this link and look at it in the status bar,
it says, "http://whatever/cgi-bin/script.cgi?name=fliptop&=ampersand";)

<a href="/cgi-bin/script.cgi?name=fliptop&copy=copy">Click here</a>

name: fliptopŠ=copy

(in case this doesn't show up, there's a little copyright symbol before
the '=')


so that only leaves one question:  how would you encode something like
this:

name=fliptop
company=at&t

?

<a href="/cgi-bin/script.cgi?name=fliptop&amp;company=at&t">Click
here</a>

name: fliptop
company: at
t: 

nope.  how about this:

<a href="/cgi-bin/script.cgi?name=fliptop&amp;company=at%26t">Click
here</a>

name: fliptop
company: at&t

ah ha!  i hope this settles this discussion.

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