I have an HTML form which must be posted to a URL. I would like the form to POST one variable named DATA like so:
DATA: somevar=someval&somevar2=someotherval
I'm having trouble doing this. It seems by default, forms urlencode the data, resulting in:
DATA: somevar%3Dsomeval%26somevar2%3Dsomeotherval
Changing the form's enc-type to "text/plain" results in:
DATA: somevar=someval
SOMEVAR2: someotherval
Is there any way I can have a form actually just send the data as above?
I am unsure what your goal is with this post, nor whether preventing URL-encoding of POST form will indeed solve your problems.
But indeed, preventing the URL encoding of the form is 100% possible, simply add the
enctype="text/plain"
attribute to the form.
Below is an example of a request without enctype text/plain and another one with it.
LMint-PC droope # nc -kl 80
POST / HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 168
%7B%22JobTypeIdentifier%22%3A3%2C%22ScheduledStart%22%3Anull%2C%22ScheduleType%22%3A%22Recurring%22%2C%22JobInputP
meters%22%3A%5B%5D%2C%22ignoreParam%22%3A%22=%22%7D^C
LMint-PC droope # ^C
LMint-PC droope # nc -kl 80
POST / HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Length: 116
{"JobTypeIdentifier":3,"ScheduledStart":null,"ScheduleType":"Recurring","JobInputParameters":[],"ignoreParam":"="}
Try http_build_query.
Update: If you are using form submission in PHP then try the following function to decode the string back: html_entity_decode
DATA string on browser ( with & ), right??No, you can't do what yo try to do. And you probably shouldn't try. The fact that you want some data inside a variable called DATA means that your POST payload (or your GET query string) will look like
DATA=somevar%3Dsomeval%26somevar2%3Dsomeotherval
If it was (as you want it to be) like
DATA=somevar=someval&somevar2=someotherval
it would mean:
DATA has a value of 'somevar=someval'
somevar2 has a value of 'someotherval'
This is because each variable has the form VARIABLE_NAME=VALUE, and they are separated by '&'.
Check this yourself in your favourite browser debugger (I use firebug and chrome built-in dev tools). So, the question is: why are you trying to do this? Knowing that it would be easier to help you achieve your goals.
EDIT: the example was wrong
