Christian (et all),
Do you (or anybody) have any thoughts on adding support for the standard '+' sign escaping to the 'unescape' code used by the built-in post processor for 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded' data? I started a thread about this a couple weeks ago (titled 'Post Processing Wtih Spaces', I think).
As a reminder, the jist is that the built-in post-processor has unescape code that can't be circumvented with your own function, but it does not decode the '+' sign used for spaces. I'm not sure if the '+' is considered spec or not, but it's been used for a very long time and is incredibly common. jQuery is inserting it in an ajax call I'm using, and I think my browser (usually Firefox) is doing it on forms submitted as well. I can avoid the problem on forms by setting the encoding type to multipart/form-data (a hack-ish workaround), but that doesn't work with the ajax call. So...
I'm proposing adding a few lines of code to MHD's internal.c's MHD_http_unescape function to do this - to look for the '+' character and substitute a space. Right now, it only looks for the %-based encoding of spaces - thereby only allowing '%20' for spaces. I solved this in my local copy with 5 lines of code - and it could have been less if I reorganized the switch statement slightly. I don't see how this could break anything, since +'s themselves are encoded to '%2B'. I.e., if you see a '+' it should ALWAYS mean a space.
If there's any risk of a backward compatibility problem, I guess
this could also be solved by allowing a custom escape function for the
built-in post-processor, but that's more work and seems a bit excessive
to me.
I can't imagine I'm the only person who has encountered this - maybe others just bite the bullet and write their own post-processor to get around it? No idea. I can certainly do that, but it seems a bit silly for such a simple/common problem. As it stands, the built-in post-processor doesn't seem useable for text-based input with 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded' encoding.
I think I saw you (Christian) were busy moving, so I don't want to nag or anything. But, I imagine a 0.9.38 release is coming up soon and would love to see this in there if you think it's appropriate.