DoForm v0.8 

Where do I get the form data from?

There are two methods which can be used to access your forms. These methods are GET and POST. Depending on which method you used, you will receive the encoded results of the form in a different way.

• The GET Method
  If your form has METHOD="GET" in its FORM tag, your CGI program will receive the encoded form input in the environment variable QUERY_STRING.
• The POST Method
  Ifyour form has METHOD="POST" in its FORM tag, your CGI program will receive the encoded form input on stdin. The server will NOT send you an EOF on the end of the data, instead you should use the environment variable CONTENT_LENGTH to determine how much data you should read from stdin.

But what does it all mean?
How do I decode the form data?
When you write a form, each of your input items has a NAME tag. When the user places data in these items in the form, that information is encoded into the form data. The value each of the input items is given by the user is called the value.

Form data is a stream of name=value pairs separated by the & character. Each name=value pair is URL encoded, i.e. spaces are changed into plusses and some characters are encoded into hexadecimal.

Because others have been presented with this problem as well, there are already a number of programs which will do this decoding for you. This is where DoForm comes into play.

The basic procedure is to split the data by the ampersands. Then, for each name=value pair you get for this, you should URL decode the name, and then the value, and then do what you like with them.

Using the DoForm script