[10633] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Using $ for CGI script arguments?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Francois Pottier)
Tue Feb 18 05:58:02 1997
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 1997 11:50:17 +0100
From: Francois.Pottier@inria.fr (Francois Pottier)
To: www-talk@w3.org
Cc: fpottier@pauillac.inria.fr (Francois Pottier)
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
Hello,
I have written a Macintosh tool (called Big Brother) which checks the
validity of http links. Among other things, it needs to parse URLs,
and I have a question about the standard form of http URLs.
RFC 2068 (the HTTP/1.1 standard) says that at the end of the path, we
can expect to find parameters (coming after a semicolon) and a query
(coming after a question mark). So, I expect URLs like this:
http://myserver.mydomain/pathsegment/scriptname;args?query
However, when looking at various existing servers, I see that arguments
to CGI scripts are passed after a $ character, like this:
http://myserver.mydomain/pathsegment/scriptname$args?query
So, my question is, what's the consensus? What are the respective
roles of the semicolon and of the dollar signs? Can they be used
interchangeably, or do they have different meanings? Should my parser
look out for both of them, and if so, in what order? etc.
I've tried looking at the CGI script specification, but it isn't
really a specification, just a bunch of examples. It doesn't even seem
to mention the use of the $ sign.
Any help shall be much appreciated!
--=20
Fran=E7ois Pottier
Francois.Pottier@inria.fr
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~fpottier/
