parse URL params in Perl

Question

I am working on some tutorials to explain things like GET/POST's and need to parse the URI manually. The follow perl code works, but I am trying to do two things:

list each key/value
be able to look up one specific value

What I do NOT care about is replacing the special chars to spaces or anything, the one value I need to get should be a number. In other languages I have used, the regular expression in question should group each key/value into one grouping with a part 1/part 2, does Perl do the same? If so, how do I put that into a map?

my @paramList = split /(?:\?|&|;)([^=]+)=([^&|;]+)/, $ENV{'REQUEST_URI'};
if(@paramList)
{
    print "<h1>The Params</h1><ul>";
    foreach my $i (@paramList) {
        if($i) {
        print "<li>$i</li>"; 
        }
    }
    print "<ul>";
}

Per the request, here is a basic example of the input:

REQUEST_URI = /cgi-bin/printenv_html.pl?customer_name=fdas&phone_number=fdsa&email_address=fads%40fd.com&taxi=van&extras=tip&pickup_time=2020-01-14T20%3A45&pickup_place=&dropoff_place=Airport&comments=

goal is the following where the left of the equal is the key, and the right is the value:

customer_name=fdas
phone_number=fdsa
email_address=fads%40fd.com
taxi=van
extras=tip
pickup_time=2020-01-14T20%3A45
pickup_place=
dropoff_place=Airport
comments=

It'd be nice to see a sample of that ENV variable (and s0 why/how split is needed) ? — zdim
– zdim, Commented Jan 25, 2020 at 22:14
Thank you, got it -- edited my answer ... still checking ... is that what you need? — zdim
– zdim, Commented Jan 25, 2020 at 22:22

zdim · Accepted Answer · 2020-01-25 22:26:21Z

3

How about feeding your list of key-value pairs into a hash?

my %paramList = $ENV{'REQUEST_URI'} =~ /(?:\?|&|;)([^=]+)=([^&|;]+)/g;

(no reason for the split as far as I can tell)

This relies crucially on there being an even-sized list of matches, where each "before-=" thing becomes a key in the hash, with the value being its pairing "after-=" thing.

In order to also get "pairs" without a value (like comments=) change + in the last pattern to *

edited Jan 25, 2020 at 22:26

answered Jan 25, 2020 at 22:07

zdim

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2 Comments

Sam Carleton Over a year ago

The only tweak was to my regex, needed to change the final + to * to also capture the ones that do NOT have values, all is good, thank you!

zdim Over a year ago

@SamCarleton Right! Just noticed that, tested, and updated with a comment

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