Decoding your arguments

When the server sends you information, it encodes them in URL format. This means:

spaces are changed into '+'
Special characters are encoded by %xx, where xx is the hexadecimal number of their ASCII equivalent

What we provide

We have written functions to do this for you, depending on what language you are writing your script in.

C
Code is available in htbin/src/util.c which will do this function for you; see the functions plustospace and unescape_url.
The Bourne shell /bin/sh
There is a program called unescape in the support directory of the httpd distribution. Usage is unescape [-e] url, where url is the information the server sends you, and the -e flag is to tell the program if it should put backslashes in front of shell characters. The program will output the decoded url.

C
To see how to use the given functions, see the query source.
Bourne shell
To see how to use unescape in a shell script, see the calendar source.

NCSA httpd Development Team

httpd@ncsa.uiuc.edu