Question

I’m using WWW::Mechanize to do some standard website traversal, but at one point I have to construct a special POST request and send it off. All this requires session cookies.

In the POST request I’m making, spaces are being encoded to + symbols, but I need them encoded as a %20.

I can’t figure out how to alter this behaviour. I realise that they are equivalent, but for reasons that are out of my hands, this is what I have to do.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

This is hard-coded in URI::_query::query_form(). It translates the spaces to +.

 $val =~ s/ /+/g;

It then calls URI::_query::query with the joined pairs, where the only + signs should be encoded spaces. The easiest thing to do is probably to intercept calls to URI::_query::query with Hook::LexWrap, modify the argument before the call starts so you can turn + into %20, and go on from there.

A little bit more annoying would be to redefine URI::_query::query. It’s not that long, and you just need to add some code at the beginning of the subroutine to transform the arguments before it continues.

Or, you can fix the broken parser on the other side. 🙂

I have a couple chapters on dealing with method overriding and dynamic subroutines in Mastering Perl. The trick is to do it without changing the original source so you don’t introduce new problems for everyone else.