h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi everyone!

I'm experimenting with CGI, and I'm very new to it. I'm trying to pass an argument from an HTML form to a CGI program which I've written in C#. I'm extracting the parameter from the form using:

string t = System.Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("QUERY_STRING");

But this produces an output with the special characters represented as "?txt=Hello+there%21", is there a way I can get that back to it's original form which was "Hello there!" using C#?

I think it will have to involve me creating a sort of find and replace routine, to translate the % entities and extract the hex code after the % sign.

I was just wondering if anybody knew a standard way of doing it?

Thanks,

Jonny

It's ok, I've finished writing the way I explained in post 1 now, and it works!

If you know Perl you may want to look at the source for CGI.pm and see how its decoding works. Parameter decoding has a few gotchas that even experienced developers frequently miss - both the Nimda and Cod Red worms exploit bugs in the URL decoding in Microsoft's Internet Information Server, for example.