Forms that Work - Parsing the Data

Remember that the server receives the form data as one big string.

firstname=yourname&meaning=to+avoid+death

Okay, although we can send the form data to the server we need to do something to break up the huge strings of form data into something more manageable.

We have to break it up or parse it into its components.

Essentially the form data is a string of key/value pairs joined by &'s

The steps involved in parsing are

• Remove the & signs and store the key/value pair in an array
• Loop through the key/value pairs in the array and split the key from the value at the = sign
• Loop through the values and replace any + signs with a space.
• Loop through the values and replace any hex codes with their ascii equivalent.
• Store the processed data in a hash array.

Once the data is stored in a suitable format in an array we can store it, manipulate it and/or send it back to the user as an html page.

To do all this requires you to have some additional knowledge of perl.

---