how to pass data to url that contain white space properly

[TW00Si]

Hello, I'm new to perl. Never seen it in my life till our ex-consultant bought a software for one of our website.

I need this piece of code (written half by the software creator and me) to pass data to a page I wrote in php.
<SCRIPT>
document.write('<a href=../updateschoolinfo.php?source=$data[schools.source]&pid=$data[schools.pid]&city=$data[schools.city]&state=$data[schools.state]&zip=$data[schools.zip]&phone=$data[schools.phone]&enrollment=$data[schools.enrollment] target=new>Update School Info</a>');
</SCRIPT>

The problem is, whenever there's a white space in any of the data field, the data following the 1st white space is cut off. How do I go about resolving this? I know I can use '+' for white space but how do I apply it here? And here's a piece from my php page that's getting the data.

<td><input name=&quot;mail_address&quot; size=&quot;35&quot; maxlength=&quot;35&quot; value=&quot;<?= $address ?>&quot;></td>

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[h011ywood]

$string =~ s/\s/\+/g

 

[siberian]

Thats not the correct route, you will catch the space but no other characters that are disallowed in a URL. Use CGI.pm

---
use CGI.pm;
$escaped_string = CGI::Util::escape(&quot;unescaped string&quot;
---

This will ensure that you do not have bad stuff in your string. Do this to each element and THEN assemble your query string.

Another guy had a problem like this where the person who coded the query string assembly code did exactly what you are doing. He now has to maintain it and its a nightmare because the source string is never properly escaped.

Proper string escaping is critical.