| Subject: | documentation suggestion with patch |
This caught us by suprise.
Maybe with a mention in the docs a few folks will be forewarned,
but more likley most CGI.pm users haven't looked at the docs for
a while :) ...at least this will give something for the search
engines to index on the matter.
-matt
--- CGI.pm Thu Feb 20 12:30:50 2003
+++ revisedCGI.pm Thu Feb 20 12:59:43 2003
@@ -4329,6 +4329,52 @@
This became the default in version 2.64.
+This default works quite well in 99% of the cases. Semicolon-delimited
+query strings work fine in URLs used in HTTP redirect responses, and
+in all places you would use an URL in HTML... for most browsers. The
+one exception is that semicolon-delimited query strings may pose a
+problem in META refresh tags in HTML when those tags are received by
+MicroSoft Internet Explorer version 6.0. This bug was observed in
+MSIE v6.0.2600.0000CO running on Windows 2000, and may exist in other
+versions of MSIE as well.
+
+A META refresh tag has roughly this form:
+
+ <!-- redirect this many seconds '10' after page loads -->
+ <META HTTP-EQUIV=Refresh CONTENT="10; URL=http://example.com/">
+ <!-- redirect to this URL ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ -->
+
+Savvy browsers should split the value of the CONTENT attribute into
+two values on the '; ' delimiter. However, MSIE splits on any ';'
+found in the value of the CONTENT attribute, and looks at the first
+two values returned. As a result, given this URL
+
+ http://example.com/some.cgi?a=foo;b=bar;c=baz
+
+Most web browsers will do the right thing. MSIE, however, will send
+the user to
+
+ http://example.com/some.cgi?a=foo
+
+Unless you can guarantee that your users will avoid this browser
+(and any other similarly-afflicted browsers), you will want to be
+cautious when constructing these refresh tags. If the URL you're
+placing in that tag is generated by CGI.pm, you can do something
+like the following...
+
+ # code out here using semicolons
+ my $redirect;
+ { # temporarily revert to ampersands instead of semicolons:
+ local $CGI::USE_PARAM_SEMICOLONS = 0;
+ $redirect = CGI::escapeHTML( CGI::url( -query => 1 ) );
+ } # now we're back to semicolons
+ $redirect = qq{<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="10; URL=$redirect">};
+
+Alternatively, you can use old ampersand-style URLs throughout
+your script (see directly below). However, the old style URLs
+will leave you with more HTML entity encoding to do as raw
+ampersands are not valid within HTML.
+
=item -oldstyle_urls
Separate the name=value pairs in CGI parameter query strings with