Re: How do I read POST data that is not encoded, and was submitted without a parameter name

[sevensven]

Great post Robin, thanks for the memory lane ;^)

Now, in my previous post to c-era previous question, I said that you could use CGI.pm (using the sample upload script that you where providing) and that was true, but only if the post data came encoded, wich it did since LWP::UserAgent plays nice with CGI and encodes the data.

CGI.pm cannot be used directly to solve your problem because it uses &; as CGI parameters separators and it will get confused by your XML sample file (as you can see if you send the CGI instance into Dumper)

The code in CGI.pm thats prevents its use is :

sub parse_params {
    my($self,$tosplit) = @_;
    my(@pairs) = split(/[&;]/,$tosplit);
    my($param,$value);
    foreach (@pairs) {
        ($param,$value) = split('=',$_,2);
        $value = '' unless defined $value;
        $param = unescape($param);
        $value = unescape($value);
        $self->add_parameter($param);
        push (@{$self->{$param}},$value);
    }
}

Now, I do agree that CGI.pm gives you a nice framework with things like carping to browser, etc., and if I said previously that CGI.pm could be used, I'll make him behave :^)

You can create a new module, let us call it xmlCGI.pm, wich inherits from CGI.pm and redefines parse_params

xmlCGI.pm could be something like this :

package xmlCGI;
use CGI;

@ISA = ("CGI");

sub parse_params {

    my($self,$tosplit) = @_;
    #*** place all the input into a param named xml
    push (@{$self->{'xml'}}, $tosplit);

    #*** notice tosplit turned to empty 
    #*** defusing the rest of this code
    $tosplit = '';
    my(@pairs) = split(/[&;]/,$tosplit);
    my($param,$value);
    foreach (@pairs) {
        ($param,$value) = split('=',$_,2);
        $value = '' unless defined $value;
        $param = unescape($param);
        $value = unescape($value);
        $self->add_parameter($param);
        push (@{$self->{$param}},$value);
    }
}
1;

Every cgi that uses xmlCGI.pm will receive a parameter named xml with all the post data.

Now, as with my previous post, I've got working code to back my claims ;^)

-- sevensven or nana korobi, ya oki