Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 09/21/06 20:59

Ike wrote:

> If I have a field which I am POSTing, and that field is, say, a
> mathematical expression such as:
>
> 2*8
>
> must I escap the * somehow?

The browser will do the necessary escaping (and your form handler has to do
the unescaping, normally by calling a suitable library subroutine).

In practice, "*" won't be escaped; it's a "safe" character.

BTW, 2*8 is just _pseudo_mathematical. In mathematics, the multiplication
sign is either × or a dot operator, for which we can use the middle dot · as
a replacement. The notation 2*8 is just computerese from the ASCII era.

> what if it is something like:
>
> 8 / 2

Similar considerations apply. In practice, the browser will escape "/" as
"%2F", but you need not worry about this at all. You simply call some
unescape routine in your form handler.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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