Hi.
I apologise if this is not really a mod_perl problem, but this list
might be my best chance to find the competences required for some tips.
Platform : SunOS 5.8 (Solaris 8)
Apache : Apache/2.0.52
Perl : v5.8.5 built for sun4-solaris
CGI.pm : 3.37
I have a perl cgi-bin script which handles a POST from a form, using
CGI.pm to retrieve the POSTed values via param().
In this form, a Java applet picks up the values of some input fields
from the form, and sends them as a POST to the cgi-bin script, along
with some other parameters (values) created in the applet itself.
The html form is UTF-8 encoded, and has (in addition) a meta tag which
says so. The browser knows it is UTF-8 (verified).
The form itself has an Accept-charset=utf-8 attribute.
Among the values send by the applet in the post, are some paths names,
of files on the workstation (Windows).
The html contains a special field for testing, whose value is Üñicôdé
encoded as UTF-8, which allows me, in the form-handling cgi-bin script,
to really check what I am receiving, in terms of charset.
(And I hope you see this correctly in this email, otherwise the
comprehension may suffer; it is the word Unicode, but modified so that
some characters would be accented and thus fall in a 2-byte-per-char
range).
In the cgi-bin, I could be receiving either a string marked by perl as
utf-8, of which the result of length(string) would be 7, and the utf8
flag would be on. That's what I expected.
It isn't so. I appear to receive a string, non-marked as utf8, and
whose length tests as 11 (the number of bytes of the UTF-8 string).
I can properly Encode::decode it to utf-8 though, and then it matches
what is sent by the form.
Still following ?
Now, the first thing I would like to understand is why this is so.
Since this is a POST, and since the browser knows that everything is
UTF-8, I would expect it to send the proper multipart POST, with each
item marked as UTF-8. So why does my cgi-bin script not see it as such ?
The second part : some of the POSTed values sent by the applet are file
upload objects, which include a path. This path also can contain
accented characters (for a German filename e.g.).
When that is the case, then it seems that what I am getting in the
cgi-bin script is (for the file path) a string where accented characters
have been replaced by question marks ?. This path string is also not
marked utf-8 for perl.
The last question is that I have configured Apache with the following
run-time directives :
ScriptLog /var/something/log/scripts.log
ScriptLogBuffer 32765
(the real POST is very small)
The directory is writeable by the user-id under which Apache is running,
but there is no log to be found. If I create the file in advance with
proper user and permission, the file stays desperately empty.
(I am trying to do that to see the content of the real POST, before
CGI.pm grabs it.)
Anyone has an idea why this log does not show up ?
Does anyone have any idea that may help me on any of the above, and in
the general search of the truth ?
Thanks in advance,
André
