Question

Is it possible to create an html checkbox form that will output to a url format such as:

?cat=cars+tree

Currently given this:

<form name="input" action="/" method="post" >
<br />Select Categories: <br />
<input type="checkbox" name = "cat" value="cars" /> Cars <br />
<input type="checkbox" name = "cat" value="tree"  /> Tree <br />
<input type="checkbox" name = "cat" value="drinks"  /> Drinks <br />
<input type="checkbox" name = "cat" value="food" /> Food <br /> <br />
<input type="submit" value="Submit" />

It would create this, if cars and tree are selected:

?cat=cars&cat=tree

Answer 1

No, I am afraid with pure HTML this is not possible, since in the W3C Recommendation for the HTML 4.01 Specification the form URL encoding is specified as follows:

application/x-www-form-urlencoded

This is the default content type. Forms submitted with this content type must be encoded as follows:

1. Control names and values are escaped. Space characters are replaced by `+’, and then reserved characters are escaped as described in [RFC1738], section 2.2: Non-alphanumeric characters are replaced by `%HH’, a percent sign and two hexadecimal digits representing the ASCII code of the character. Line breaks are represented as “CR LF” pairs (i.e., `%0D%0A’).

2. The control names/values are listed in the order they appear in the document. The name is separated from the value by `=’ and name/value pairs are separated from each other by `&’.