[WEB400] Re: CGI URL

[Hans Boldt <boldt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Brad Stone wrote:
> So you have brought up 100 times, hans.  We're still waiting
> for BIFs to be included in RPG to do this.  Or is that too
> much to ask.  I would think that this one thing that you
> keep pointing out, if it really does bother you that much,
> that it would be on the top of your to do list for new BIFs.
New BIF's specific one particular application domain? Why bother,
since the ability to write your own has existed for years now! You
know how to write a procedure, don't you?

> No offense, Hans, but I'm sure I'm not the only one that
> gets tired of hearing how great Perl, Python, etc are, and
> the all of the RPG CGI references are missing encoding
> procedures.  But, CGIDEV2 does have the Char2Hex and
> Hex2Char subprocedures which can be used to encode special
> characters.
>
> It's funny, though, that I have yet to need this
> functionality.
You have yet to need this functionality?!? You have got to be joking.

Come on now, Brad, you of all people should know better. We've
discussed this before. You know bloody well that if you're putting
data from a database into an HTML document, and that data has one of
the HTML special characters ('<', '>', and '&') you need to convert
the character to a special character entity (&lt;, &gt, and &amp;).
If you don't, your data probably won't render properly. This is a
*fundamental* principle of CGI programming. You also know full well
that query strings must be URL encoded. And "Char2Hex" won't do the
correct conversion either, since it doesn't do an EBCDIC to ASCII
conversion.

Hans