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Standard input stream

If a request is made with the HTTP POST method, the data sent by the browser will be passed to the CGI script by the server in the script's standard input stream. The MIME type of the data and its length are indicated by the environment variables CONTENT_TYPE and CONTENT_LENGTH as described above. The script may not receive an end of file indication if it tries to read more information from the input stream than is indicated by the content length.

Currently the only use of the POST method is to send user input from fill-out forms. The encoding of forms data is described in Section .

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.