Mod Perl Icon Mod Perl Icon Workarounds for some known bugs in browsers.


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The Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C book can be purchased online from O'Reilly and Amazon.com.
Your corrections of the technical and grammatical errors are very welcome. You are encouraged to help me improve this guide. If you have something to contribute please send it directly to me.
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Preventing QUERY_STRING from getting corrupted because of &entity key names

In a URL which contains a query string, if the string has multiple parts separated by ampersands and it contains a key named ``reg'', for example http://my.site.com/foo.pl?foo=bar&reg=foobar, then some browsers will interpret &reg as an SGML entity and encode it as ®. This will result in a corrupted QUERY_STRING. If you encounter this problem, then either you should avoid using such keys or you should separate parameter pairs with ; instead of &. CGI.pm, Apache::Request and $r->args() support a semicolon instead of an ampersand as a separator. So your URI should look like this: http://my.site.com/foo.pl?foo=bar;reg=foobar.

Note that this is only an issue when you are building your own URLs with query strings. It is not a problem when the URL is the result of submitting a form because the browsers have to get that right.

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IE 4.x does not re-post data to a non-port-80 URL

One problem with publishing 8080 port numbers (or so I have been told) is that IE 4.x has a bug when re-posting data to a non-port-80 URL. It drops the port designator and uses port 80 anyway.

See Publishing Port Numbers other than 80. [ TOC ]


Your corrections of the technical and grammatical errors are very welcome. You are encouraged to help me improve this guide. If you have something to contribute please send it directly to me.
The Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C book can be purchased online from O'Reilly and Amazon.com.

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Written by Stas Bekman.
Last Modified at 06/21/2000

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