You can post this script as a reply to your root node. Please wrap it in <code>...</code> tags so it renders and downloads nicely.

If the script is hand-rolling its own parameter decoding, it has likely other deficiencies. Normally, you want to use CGI.pm for handling all the CGI decoding.

That is the funny thing, I am adapting a script put out by PayPal that had their own handrolled CGI and attempting to make it use the CGI module.

The problem is I need to get a just the straight post string to add a parameter and send it off, param() isn't letting me do it. Any ideas on how to access the raw post string using the CGI module, right now the script does this:

read (STDIN, $query, $ENV{'CONTENT_LENGTH'});
$query .= '&cmd=_notify-validate';
[download]

There has to be something in CGI to do that read() line.

Since CGI.pm gives you a couple of ways to fetch all the parameters it's passed, you could just add your new parameter to the list and then send it all back out using LWP.

With a little bit of error checking, this could also save you from blindly sending back out any malformed data you receive.

So: you might use this code to learn some Perl, but please don't copy it, as it can really not be considered "best practices" any more.

Yep I know that, just need to know what it did so that when I was rewriting this program to use CGI that I didn't leave something out. I've gotten past that now and am having trouble implementing CGI.pm to send back the post request to the server. When I post the query object back PayPal doesn't like the way it's formatted. I am trying to resist using the read() function to get the post string but the CGI module isn't making this too easy. Does anyone know how I can get at the post data and add a var (I've done this using param() ) and then send it back using LWP without screwing up the format?

use strict;
use CGI;
[download]

Next is a rather complicated regular expression that substitutes every %HH hex pair back to its equivalent ASCII character, using the pack() function. We'll learn exactly how this works in Chapter 14, but for now we'll just use it to parse the form data:

    $value =~ s/%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])/pack("C", hex($1))/eg;
[download]